Posted on 11/11/2013 6:34:03 PM PST by BenLurkin
Wasn't this the missing chapter from the Kama Sutra?
-PJ
After scare, India’s Mars mission healthy, back on track
New Delhi: India’s mission to Mars, launched last week, is reportedly back on track with an early morning operation by ISRO pushing the spacecraft to a higher velocity as planned. On Monday, the Mars Orbiter Mission or Mangalyaan hit its first hurdle during a fourth repositioning to take it 100,000 kilometres from Earth when the thruster engines briefly failed.
ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan told NDTV today, “All is well and operations completed as planned’. The final orbit of the spacecraft will be known in a few hours.
The ISRO chief had said yesterday that a failure analysis committee will examine the glitch the spacecraft had hit, but added that crucially, not much fuel was wasted in the failed attempt.
Mangalyaan had a flawless launch last Tuesday, for an 11-month trip to the Red Planet. Lacking a large enough rocket to blast directly out of Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational pull, the Indian spacecraft is orbiting Earth until the end of the month while building up enough velocity to break free.
The 450-crore mission to Mars has made international headlines, at least in part for its cost-efficiency. It is less than a sixth of the $455 million earmarked for a Mars probe by NASA which will launch later this month.
More than half of all missions to Mars have ended in failure, including China’s in 2011 and Japan’s in 2003.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/after-scare-india-s-mars-mission-healthy-back-on-track-444771
They needed hotter curry in the fuel.
Well, it was supposed to be. This is a pretty impressive project by India, it would have shown up a lot of their muzzie competition (like Pakistan, Iran) and I’m sure this won’t be the last gasp. For one thing, they don’t have Obama ruining things.
Mars has been difficult to bullseye. The very first interplanetary probe attempt was the USSR’s — trying to hit Mars. Khruschev made a cryptic public statement (since the Soviets always kept the specifics under wraps until the mission was over, and then only revealed the successes) that was apparently in reference to this Mars-shot, then nothing materialized because of the failure. The first US interplanetary success was a few years later, and managed to beam back a short series of nice fly-by shots of Mars — but the trajectory was a little off, so the probe didn’t enter gravitational capture and orbit. That was in 1965. The craters were a sensational find.
http://www.space.com/18787-mariner-4.html
Russia’s Second Shot at Phobos May Return Bits of Mars As Well
universetoday.com
Posted on 11/11/2013 6:55:14 PM PST by BenLurkin
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3090233/posts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Mariner_program
Mariner 9 successfully entered orbit about Mars, the first spacecraft ever to do so, after the launch time failure of its sister ship, Mariner 8. When Mariner 9 reached Mars, it and two Soviet orbiters (Mars 2 and Mars 3, see Mars probe program below) found that a planet-wide dust storm was in progress. The mission controllers used the time spent waiting for the storm to clear to have the probe rendezvous with, and photograph, Phobos. When the storm cleared sufficiently for Mars’ surface to be photographed by Mariner 9, the pictures returned represented a substantial advance over previous missions. These pictures were the first to offer more detailed evidence that liquid water might at one time have flowed on the planetary surface. They also finally discerned the true nature of many Martian albedo features. For example, Nix Olympica was one of only a few features that could be seen during the planetary duststorm, revealing it to be the highest mountain (volcano, to be exact) on any planet in the entire Solar System, and leading to its reclassification as Olympus Mons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon)#Exploration
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