ISRO released pictures of comet Siding Spring taken by Mars Orbiter Mangalyaan

Dear readers an followers,

While the +European Space Agency, ESA  had placed a robot Philae on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) released images of Comet Siding Spring, taken by its Mars Orbiter 'Mangalyaan' on October 2014. ISRO's Mars Orbiter had the opportunity to witness the Comet Siding Spring approach Mars on October 19th, for which the spacecraft repositioned itself for its safety.

The Mars Colour Camera on board ISRO's Mars Orbiter has captured the Coma (top bright portion) of the comet partly, as it approached MOM during last 40 minutes of the imaging session before Mars-Comet close encounter, ISRO said in its social networking site along with the pictures.

Credit image: ISRO

The India's Mars Orbiter Mission, the Mangalyaan probe is a spacecraft powered by solar arrays and packed with five instruments to study the surface and atmosphere of Mars. The 1350 kg of the spacecraft has been launched with success from a pad at the agency's Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on November 5th 2013. India was particularly proud that MOM was developed with homegrown technology and for a bargain price of about $75 million, a cost that Modi quipped was lower than many Hollywood film budgets. By comparison, NASA's much larger Maven mission cost nearly 10 times as much at $671 million.

Credit image: ISRO

It also will search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes. None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist India wanted the spacecraft, also called Mangalyaan, meaning "Mars craft" in Hindi, to show the world its ability to design, plan, manage and operate a difficult, deep-space mission. India has already conducted dozens of successful satellite launches, including sending up the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, which discovered key evidence of water on the Moon in 2008 and validated few month ago.

The country's space scientists are already planning new missions, including putting a rover on the Moon. But space agency chief K. Radhakrishnan said their main focus would be to continue developing technologies for commercial and navigational satellite applications.

Source: ISRO

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First picture of the Indian Mars orbiter

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yesterday, India announced the successful of its first mission to mars. Today the ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission captures its first image of the red planet. The picture has been taken from a height of 7300 km of altitude with a 376 m spatial resolution by the Mangalyaan probe.

Credit image: ISRO

India's 1,350 kg orbiter will now circle the planet for at least six months, with five solar-powered instruments gathering scientific data that may shed light on Martian weather systems as well as what happened to the water that is believed to have existed once on Mars in large quantities.

Source: Indian Space and Research Organization

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India successfully puts spacecraft in Mars' orbit

Dear readers and followers,

after the mission sent by +European Space Agency, ESA, Mars Express, and after the mission sent by +NASA, curiosity, and the missions Mars2 and Mars3 sent by Russia, India is the fourth country to send a mission to the red planet. This was in November 2013 !

Today, India triumphed in its first interplanetary mission, placing a satellite into orbit around Mars on Wednesday morning and catapulting the country into an elite club of deep-space explorers. The Mangalyaan probe is a spacecraft powered by solar arrays and packed with five instruments to study the surface and atmosphere of Mars. 

Credit image: Indian Space and Research Organization

Scientists broke into wild cheers as the orbiter's engines completed 24 minutes of burn time to maneuver the spacecraft into its designated place around the red planet. "We have gone beyond the boundaries of human enterprise and innovation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, standing alongside scientists with the Indian Space and Research Organisation at the command center in the southern tech hub of Bangalore. "We have navigated our craft through a route known to very few," Modi said, congratulating the scientists and "all my fellow Indians on this historic occasion." Scientists described the final stages of the Mars Orbiter Mission, affectionately nicknamed MOM, as flawless. The success marks a milestone for the space program in demonstrating that it can conduct complex missions and act as a global launch pad for commercial, navigational and research satellites.

It's also a major feat for the developing country of 1.2 billion people, most of whom are poor. At the same time, India has a robust scientific and technical educational system that has produced millions of software programmers, engineers and doctors, propelling many into the middle class. 

Getting a spaceship successfully into orbit around Mars is no easy task. More than half the world's previous attempts, 23 out of 41 missions, have failed, including one by Japan in 1999.

USA had its first success with a 1964 flyby by a spacecraft called Mariner 4, returning 21 images of the surface of the planet. The former Soviet Union reached the planet in 1971, and the European Space Agency in 2003. NASA congratulated India in a Twitter message welcoming MOM to studying the red planet. On Sunday, NASA achieved its own success in placing its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or Maven, in position. The U.S. has two more satellites circling the planet at the moment, as well as two rovers rolling across the rocky Martian surface. The European Space Agency's Mars Express, launched over a decade ago, is still operating as well.

India was particularly proud that MOM was developed with homegrown technology and for a bargain price of about $75 million, a cost that Modi quipped was lower than many Hollywood film budgets. By comparison, NASA's much larger Maven mission cost nearly 10 times as much at $671 million.

India's 1,350 kg orbiter will now circle the planet for at least six months, with five solar-powered instruments gathering scientific data that may shed light on Martian weather systems as well as what happened to the water that is believed to have existed once on Mars in large quantities.

It also will search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes. None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist India wanted the spacecraft - also called Mangalyaan, meaning "Mars craft" in Hindi -to show the world its ability to design, plan, manage and operate a difficult, deep-space mission. India has already conducted dozens of successful satellite launches, including sending up the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, which discovered key evidence of water on the Moon in 2008.

The country's space scientists are already planning new missions, including putting a rover on the Moon. But space agency chief K. Radhakrishnan said their main focus would be to continue developing technologies for commercial and navigational satellite applications.

Source: Indian Space and Research Organization

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Successful launch of the Indian spacecraft to Mars

Dear followers,

after the mission sent by +European Space Agency, ESA, Mars Express, and after the mission sent by +NASA, curiosity, and the missions Mars2 and Mars3 sent by Russia, India is the fourth country to send a mission to the red planet. The India's Mars Orbiter Mission, the Mangalyaan probe is a spacecraft powered by solar arrays and packed with five instruments to study the surface and atmosphere of Mars. The 1350 kg of the spacecraft has been launched with success from a pad at the agency's Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota this morning.

Credits: +TIME 

Those instruments include a color camera for photographic imaging, a spectrometer for surface composition and mineralogy analysis and a methane sensor.

We will provide you more details in the next hours, stay tune.

Water on the Moon found

Dear followers,

a new study, published on the journal Nature Geoscience, has revealed the probably presence of water on the Moon when it first formed 4.5 billion year ago.

The new water signatures discovered in the center peak of Bullialdus crater on the Moon have the form of hydroxyl molecules. Hydroxyls are molecules consisting of an oxygen atom connected to a hydrogen atom. The pairing is often seen as a substructure of the water molecule.

Credits: +NASA / +Arizona State University 

The scientists have detected magnetic water on the surface of the Moon. This type of water  is originating from deep within the Moon's interior. These findings has been performed using data from +NASA 's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) carried on-board India's Chandrayann-1 lunar orbiter.

Sources: +Universe Today and +Astro Watch 

The India GSLV launch has been delayed after a fuel leak

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yesterday India planed to launch GSLV rocket with the payload GSAT-14 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota Island on India's east coast. However, it seems that a fuel leak before the countdown stop the launch process. This launch should be the first one since back-to-back failures in 2010.

Credits: ISRO

The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicule (GSLV) is and expendable launch system operated by the India Space Reasearch Organisation (ISRO). This launcher has been developed to enable India to launch its own INSAT-type satellites into GEO orbit and to make India less dependent on foreign rockets such as Ariane5 or the Soyuz program.

Successful launch of Navigation Satellite from India

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yesterday, Monday July 1st , India has successfully put the country’s first Navigation Satellite into orbit on Monday. A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s East coast at 18:11 UTC.

Credits: +ISRO

The IRNSS-1A spacecraft has been delivered to its intended orbit about 20 minutes after launch. This successful flight starts the race for India to its own navigation constellation, the Indian Regional Navigation System that will cover the country and surrounding areas.