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Project
PROJECT TYPE
Mars orbiter
LAUNCH DATE
November 2013
LAUNCH SITE
Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Srihairkota
LAUNCH MASS
1,340kg
LAUNCH VEHICLE
PSLV-XL C-25
MANUFACTURER
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft was designed and developed by ISRO.
The spacecraft includes five scientific payload instruments indigenously developed by ISRO.
The MOM spacecraft was transported to Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR for carrying out launch operations.
The spacecraft was integrated with PSLVC-25 rocket.
The MOM development programme was approved by the government of India in August 2012.
The MOM spacecraft was launched on 5 November 2013 from the first launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR.
The core objectives of the Mangalyan spacecraft include discovering technical aspects relating to the surface,
features, morphology, mineralogy and atmosphere on Mars, with the help of locally developed scientific
instruments.
ISRO aims to gather data to establish how Martian weather systems work and know what happened to the water
that is supposed to have been formerly present on the planet. It will also search for methane, which is an
important chemical in life processes.
At $73m (INR 4.5bn), India's Mars mission is considered to be the cheapest by any nation. The Nasa's Mars
Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, with an estimated cost of $485m, was launched on 18
November 2013.
The MOM spacecraft has a launch mass of 1,340kg including a dry mass of 475kg, a payload mass of 15kg, and a
fuel load of 852kg. It is equipped with a single deployable solar array with three panels each measuring 1.4m x
1.8m in size. It also includes a yoke and drive mechanism.
The spacecraft is based on the I-1K satellite bus platform manufactured by ISRO. The satellite bus is cuboidal,
featuring composite and metallic honeycomb sandwich panels.
The spacecraft testing was completed between August and September 2013. The programme was completed
within 15 months.
The spacecraft stayed on trans-Martian orbit for around 300 days, before entering the Mars orbit in September
2014. It will travel more than 780 million kilometres to complete orbiting Mars.
India's Mars orbiter spacecraft equipment
The spacecraft is fitted with five scientific payload instruments weighing about 15kg. The payloads include lyman
alpha photometer (LAP), Martian exospheric neutral composition analyser (MENCA), Mars colour camera (MCC),
methane sensor for Mars (MSM), and thermal infrared imaging system (TIS).
The MCC weighs 1.4kg and includes a 2,000pxx2,000px array detector with RGB bayer filter. The payload will take
50km x 50km frame size colour images to study the Martian surface topography.
The MSM payload weighs 3.6kg and includes a Fabry-Perot Etalon sensor. Its objective is to measure methane
concentrations in the Mars atmosphere. The TIS payload weighs 4kg and includes a spectrometer. It will measure
thermal emissions from the Martian surface.
The spacecraft is also fitted with a parabolic X-band reflector high gain antenna with a 2.2m diameter, which will
be used for data downlink and command uplink. The low and medium antennas fitted to the aircraft enable low-
bandwidth communications. It includes two solid state recorders with a storage capacity of 16GB in the
spacecraft.
Data from the spacecraft will be downlinked using 18m and 32m antennae of Indian Deep Space Network, located
at Bangalore.
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