Bangalore/Chennai: Cruising at 32km per second, the Indian spacecraft to Mars is now in the sun's orbit on its way towards the red planet after leaving earth's gravity early Sunday, making India the first Asian country and fourth in the world to leap into interplanetary space.
"The spacecraft (Orbiter) is on course to encounter Mars, coasting at 32km per second to traverse the 680-million km sun's orbit in 298 days and reach the red planet Sept 24, 2014," a senior space agency official said.
India's Rs.450-crore exploratory mission to Mars, about 400 million km from earth, makes it the part of a elite grouping including Russia, US and the European Space Agency (ESA) which have undertaken such missions.
"The Orbiter is healthy and its subsystems are normal. It will leave the earth's sphere of influence Dec 4 to free from its gravitational pull, which extends up to 918,347 km in space," state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) director Deviprasad Karnik told IANS.
The Orbiter was flung into outer space at 1.11 a.m. after its engine was fired at 12.49 a.m. for 22 minutes for the crucial trans-Mars injection at a velocity (speed) of 648 metres per second.
"The trans-Mars injection operation was successful. Everything went off well and all systems onboard the spacecraft are working well," ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan told IANS on phone.
Scientists at the space agency's Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (Istrac), handling the Orbiter geo-centric phase, however, had some anxious moments as they did not get data from a ground station in South Africa due to bad weather.
"Due to thunderstorm in South Africa where one of our ground stations tracking the Orbiter is located, we did not have the data from there when the engine was fired. We got the data later," Radhakrishan said.
