India set to launch its debut Mars mission
It's the Mount Everest of the solar system, conquered
only by an elite group. Now India is set to join the US, Russia and
Europe in the exclusive club by sending a probe to Mars, with the launch
expected on 5 November.
Established in the 1960s, India's space programme has so far focused on aiding the country's development
,
building satellites to spot potential sources of groundwater and
monitor deforestation. Then in 2008 it launched Chandrayaan-1, a lunar
orbiter, and now has plans for further probes to study the moon and
space weather.
,
building satellites to spot potential sources of groundwater and
monitor deforestation. Then in 2008 it launched Chandrayaan-1, a lunar
orbiter, and now has plans for further probes to study the moon and
space weather.
These projects may seem divorced from
India's development goals, but could lead to spin-off applications in
areas like remote sensing and shape a new generation of scientists and
engineers, says K. R. Sridhara Murthi, who worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation for nearly 40 years.
The main goal of the $73 million Mars
Orbiter Mission (MOM) is to prove that India can put a working probe
into Mars orbit. That is no small feat – more than half of all Mars missions so far have failed. "It's a stretch goal," says Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC.
One big challenge will be making sure the
spacecraft's electronics function reliably in the harsh temperature and
radiation conditions at Mars, he says. This was a problem for
Chandrayaan-1, which discovered water on the lunar surface but died more than a year early because its electronics could not withstand the heat radiated from the moon.
Quest for methane
MOM should also help to unravel some of the planet's mysteries. It will carry five scientific instruments,
including a methane sensor to try to pick up the gas in Mars's
atmosphere. On Earth, methane is mainly produced by life, so there was a
stir when Earth-based instruments and a European probe detected traces
of it in Mars's atmosphere a decade ago. Some are sceptical of those
results, believing they were triggered by methane in Earth's atmosphere
or perhaps water in Mars's, and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to
the scepticism by finding no methane
when it breathed in the Martian air. "I'd say the data are equivocal at
the moment," says John Mustard of Brown University in Providence, Rhode
Island.
MOM may also help reveal how Mars became a
cold, dry planet, with an atmosphere too thin to support liquid water
for long periods. Gaping canyons and river-like channels point to large
amounts of water – and therefore a thick, warming atmosphere – in the
past. A study published this week suggests a form of natural geoengineering was partially responsible for the red planet's global cooling.
NASA's MAVEN mission, also due to launch
next month, will tackle that same puzzle, but with a larger suite of
instruments. "To have India executing a successful orbiter mission would
be great for space science," says Mustard.
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