India's Mars mission to take off on Tuesday

, Nov 2: Officials confirm that India's

Orbiter Mission will take off as planned on Tuesday, November 5, at 2.38 p.m.

An ISRO official said the Launch Authorisation Board on Friday cleared the flight from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
The 56-hour countdown begins on Sunday at 6.08 a.m.

The green signal comes a day after ISRO completed a dry run or rehearsal to test the launch readiness of its mission control staff and centres, says a report in The Hindu.

The 1,350-kg spacecraft carrying five experiments is slated to be flown on a PSLV vehicle from the Sriharikota launchpad. After a 53-minute cruise it will be ejected into space somewhere over the South Pacific, after which it will follow a special path or trajectory initially around Earth over the next 25 days.

To capture details of these critical moments, ISRO has put tracking terminals on two ships and deployed them to the South Pacific along with its engineers and navigation scientists.

On November 30, the spacecraft will be thrust out of the Earth's pull and on to its path towards Mars. That is a journey of 300 days. The orbiter is slated to reach the Martian sphere of influence on September 24, 2014, and then go around the Earth's neighbour for at least six months.

Nasa wishes good luck !

Prior to the highly anticipated mission, NASA wished the Indian space agency with "lucky peanuts" on its Facebook page. The message titled 'lucky peanuts' read, "As you prepare for your launch to Mars, do not forget one of the few, but important action: pass around the peanuts!"
The American Nasa/JPL is also providing communications and navigation support to this mission to the red planet with their deep space network facilities.

Illustrating the tradition of peanuts for Mars Mission at JPL, the post read: "It goes back to the 1960s with the very first missions we sent to the moon. We had seven mission attempts to go the moon before we succeeded, and on the seventh one, they had passed out peanuts in the control room."

"Ranger 7, which in July 1964 became the first US space probe to successfully transmit close images of the moon's surface back to the earth, made the peanuts into a tradition at JPL," it added.

Stating that ever since, it has been a long standing tradition to hand out peanuts "whenever we launch and whenever we do anything important like land on Mars", the post by JPL read: "We use all the luck we can get!"

Giving away another traditional secret to Isro, followed during the launch that has proved lucky to Nasa, the post said "For MSL, (Mars Science Laboratory) we put a label on the jar that says "dare mighty things."

"This phrase was taken from Theodore Roosevelt's quote, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to winglorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live In the grey twilight that knows nether victory nor defeat.""

The post greeted Isro and its scientist's with slogans - "GO MOM!!!" "GOOD LUCK MOM!" "DARE MIGHTY THINGS". Isro's MOM - joined Facebook on October 22 and has received more than 11,850 likes in a short span.

OneIndia News

(With agency inputs)