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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ISRO repositioned Mars Orbiter to be not affected by the comet Siding Spring

Dear readers and followers,

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has repositioned its Mars Orbiter, as the national space agency along with its counterparts around the world are expecting Comet Siding Spring to fly by the Red Planet on October 19. ISRO, but also the US space agency NASA and other space agencies in the world, which have sent their missions to the Red Planet have taken precautionary measures to save their satellites from any possible collision with the space debris, which might be facilitated by the movement of the Comet near Mars. 

Kiran Kumar, Director of Space Application Centre from ISRO aannouncedthat they have repositioned the Mars Orbiter, as the Comet Siding Spring is expected to be close to the Mars on October 19. They have taken the Orbiter to a position farthest from the tail of the Comet so that it doesn't affect the satellite,".

According to NASA, Comet Siding Spring has traveled many billions of km and would come within about 140,000 km of Mars on October 19. The comet comes from the Oort Cloud, material left over from the formation of the solar system. India is the fourth country to send a mission to the red planet. This was in November 2013 !

All five operational spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet — NASA's Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN probes, India's Mangalyaan spacecraft and Europe's Mars Express, will observe the flyby. And NASA's Opportunity and Curiosity rovers will crane their necks up to watch from the Martian surface as well.

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