Mars mission gets October, 2013 launch date deadline as India reaches out to the stars

India's space mission to Mars, expected to be launched in October, will look for signature of life and the reasons for loss of atmosphere on the red planet, a top scientist said here.

Work on the Mars Orbiter Mission, announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his Independence Day address last year, is going on full steam and equipment of the five experiments planned during the mission are expected to be delivered to ISRO in March.

"We should get the five payloads by March and we plan to start integrating them in the satellite from April," Jitendra Nath Goswami, director of the Physical Research Laboratory and closely involved with the Mars mission, said.

ISRO's trusted warhorse rocket PSLV-XL is expected to launch the mission some time in October from the spaceport Sriharikota which will first keep orbiting the earth, achieving the necessary velocity to escape the earth's gravitational pull.

As per existing plans, the satellite is expected to exit the Earth's orbit on November 26 and embark on the journey to Mars which is expected to last for around 300 days.

The scientists have drawn up plans to insert the satellite in an orbit around Mars on September 22 next year.

Once in the Martian orbit, the satellite will start taking pictures of the red planet with an onboard colour camera and infra-red spectrometer, while the Lyman-alpha photometer would measure atomic hydrogen in the Martian atmosphere.

"The previous missions to Mars have shown that there was water on the planet. We would want to know how and why the planet lost water and carbon dioxide," Goswami told reporters on the sidelines of the 100th Indian Science Congress here. "Nobody has done research why water was lost. We are trying to do things which were not precisely or exactly done," Goswami said.

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