The Indian Space Reserch Organisation’s Mars Orbiter Mission will perform a Trajectory Correction Manoeuvre tomorrow as announced early this month.
The time scheduled for the exercise is 4:30 pm. The action will last 16 seconds.
ISRO has been continuously monitoring the spacecraft using its Deep Space Network complemented by that of NASA-JPL. As the Mars mission is “on intended track”, has been proceeding towards the red planet with “good health” along with its five scientific instruments and is “on its designated trajectory”, ISRO had earlier announced that the trajectory correction manoeuvre scheduled for April was not necessary and postponed it for this month.
MOM traveled more than 460 million km distance in its 680 million km elliptical trajectory around Sun. As of 9 June, it was at a distance of about 100 million km from planet Earth. The two way radio communication delay is approximately 11 minutes.
On 9 April at 9:50 am IST, India’s Mars Orbiter Spacecraft had crossed the half-way mark of its journey to the Red Planet along the designated helio-centric trajectory. The spacecraft was launched onboard PSLV-C25 on 5 November 2013. On 1 December last year, Trans Mars Injection manoeuvre was conducted successfully and the spacecraft was set in its course towards Planet Mars through a helio-centric trajectory. Soon after the Spacecraft crossed the sphere of influence of Earth, a Trajectory Correction Manoeuvre (TCM) was performed successfully on 11 December 2013.
Periodic tests are being done on the different levels of autonomy built into the Spacecraft for managing contingencies.
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