After a marathon 780-million-kilometre journey, India has not only arrived at Mars this week – it has entered the elite club of planetary explorers and kicked an Asian space race into high gear.
By successfully going into orbit around Mars, India has become the first Asian nation in history to do so, says Pallava Bagla, one of India’s leading space exploration analysts.
“We really consider this a nationalist mission since it is taking India to Mars,” Bagla told Yahoo Canada News in an interview.
“But at the same time it also signifies a space race that is really heating up between India and China.”
The solar powered Mars orbiter, known as Mangalyaan – which means ‘Mars craft’ in Hindi –started its marathon journey 10 months ago, and late Wednesday successfully conducted a series of braking manoeuvres leaving it in orbit around the Red Planet.
Until now, China has been able to beat India in almost every aspect of space exploration with its astronauts program, upcoming orbiting space station and current robotic lunar rover, Jade Rabbit.
However, now that India has managed to pull off this Mars mission, many will say it has leapfrogged ahead of China.
“There is no doubt that their technological rivalry on Earth has now translated into space, and it looks like an Asian superpower space race is here to stay in the 21st century,” Bagla said.
China may be poised to overtake India again, however, if they successfully follow through with plans of having their own robotic rover touch down on Mars in 2020.
India considers the mission a demonstrator, showing off its ability to do both high technology and relevant science. Mangalyaan shows that the East-Asian nation can build, launch and communicate with a probe capable of traveling across the vast distances of deep space and do meaningful science when it gets to the Red Planet.
“I think this mission really tells the world that our country can do sophisticated interplanetary travel and do it all on its own,” Bagla explained.
The country’s space agency, the India Space Research Organization (ISRO) designed the $73-million orbiter to investigate some of the most confounding mysteries surrounding the disappearance of surface water on the planet and understand its global weather patterns better.
Over the next six-months, Mangalyaan will also try to sniff out potential sources of methane gas that has been detected by past missions, which is considered a chemical by-product of life and geological processes.
And Mars fever is in high gear, as a new invasion of the planet is underway. India’s mission comes on the heels of another spacecraft’s arrival into orbit around Mars this week. NASA’s MAVEN robotic probe set up shop this past Sunday to study the tenuous Martian atmosphere in the hopes of understanding why and how the planet went from a being wet and warm to cold and dry.
“We want to address the questions of, where did the water go, where did the CO2 go?” said MAVEN mission’s science lead Bruce Jakosky in an interview with Yahoo Canada News. “And we’re doing this by studying the upper atmosphere, so that we can learn how much of the gas was lost to space over time – stripped away by the sun and the solar wind,”
Scientists from both countries are also elated at the prospect of now having two probes that can concurrently study the Martian atmosphere.
By making it to Mars safely on its maiden voyage, India has even beat out Russia and America and is boldly telling the world we can go to Mars alone.— Pallava Bagla, Indian space exploration analyst
“We on the MAVEN team are delighted that India has successfully gotten into orbit,” Jakosky said. “We posted our congratulations to them both on our Facebook page and on theirs, and I sent personal congratulations to their science lead.
“Some of the science goals overlap, and we’ve discussed possible coordination of observations and collaboration on science analysis, and so we anticipate getting into more detail and reaching an agreement on this type of collaboration.”
With Mars sitting some 200 million kilometres away, exploration of the Red Planet is risky business. More than half of all Mars missions in history have never made it to their destination. And what makes this success for India so much sweeter is that no country has made it on their first attempt, as fellow Asian rivals Japan (1999) and China (2011) can attest to.
“By making it to Mars safely on its maiden voyage, India has even beat out Russia and America and is boldly telling the world we can go to Mars alone,” Bagla said.
“This will no doubt tremendously boost the morale of the country and helps keep our flag flying high.”
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