India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Indian Space research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G Madavan Nair said on Monday that India would launch a mission to Mars by 2013. The ISRO has begun the preparations for sending a spacecraft to Mars. Earlier on Aug 13 the Union Government sanctioned seed money of Rs 10 crore for Mars project, to carry out various studies on experiments to be conducted, route of the mission and other related details necessary to scale the new frontier. On Sunday ISRO called off the maiden lunar mission after Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore lost control over the Chndrayaan-I spacecraft. Though Chandrayaan-I was slated to be a two-year mission, Nair claimed that ISRO scientists have achieved nearly 95% of Chandrayaan's scientific goals in less than a year. XXXXXXXXXXXX Nair said, "The net result is that the lunar station has lost radio contact with the craft and we are not receiving any signal. So we had to terminate the mission with this sequence...we made all attempts but our attempts were not succeed. About 95 percent of the objectives of the scientific experiments have been completed and we have more than 70,000 images of the moon, especially the most critical regions are in our custody," he added. The 79-million dollar mission was launched amid national euphoria last October, putting India in the Asian space race alongside China. A probe vehicle landed on the moon a month later and sent back images of the lunar surface. But a critical sensor in the main craft, orbiting the moon, malfunctioned in July, raising fears that the two-year mission might have to be curtailed. One of the mission's main aims was to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on earth but could be an energy source in the future in nuclear fusion. The ISRO has plans to send a manned mission to space in four years' time and eventually on to Mars.

ISRO to launch Mars mission by 2013