ISRO gearing up for Mars mission
12 Aug 2009
New Delhi: The technical success of Chandrayaan-I appears to have lifted ISRO's ambitions into a higher orbit and now sees it gearing up for bigger challenges. The Indian space agency today announced it had begun preparations for a mission to Mars and had received seed money of Rs10 crore from the government.
The mission will launch sometime over the next six years.
The seed money would enable ISRO carry out various studies on the experiments to be conducted in course of the mission, the route that the proposed spacecraft would take on its way to the Red Planet and other related details, said ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair.
"Already mission studies have been completed. Now we are trying to collect scientific proposals and scientific objectives," he told reporters on the sidelines of a day-long workshop of the Astronautical Society of India here.
Nair said the space agency was looking at launch opportunities between 2013 and 2015.
The technical complexity of the Chandrayaan-I mission and its spectacular success appears to have inspired young scientists in the country to approach ISRO, which has determined to tap this pool of talent for the Mars mission.
.webp)
.webp)
