Chennai, November 12: After the scare that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) went through on Monday when it failed to raise the orbit of its Mars spacecraft to the required height, the ISRO’ s renewed attempt on Tuesday early morning turned out to be a success.
After the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) at Bangalore gave commands to the Mars spacecraft’s propulsion system on Tuedsay at 5 a.m.to fire, the propulsion system fired for about 304 seconds and the spacecraft’s apogee shot up from 78276 km to 118642 km as required, sending ripples of joy at the ISTRAC.
The ISRO conducted a trial yesterday when it activated both the primary coil and the redundant coil in the Mars spacecraft’s propulsion system , called the 440 Newton engine, to allow the flow of the liquid propellants into the engine. This trial backfired and the flow of liquid propellants stopped. So the orbiter did not reach the required apogee.
However, when the primary and redundant coils were used separately or independently during the previous orbit -raising manoeuvres on November7, 8 and 9, the manoeuvres were successful. So the ISTRAC used the primary coil again today (Tuesday) and succeeded in boosting the spacecraft’s apogee.
The ISTRAC will try to raise the apogee of the spacecraft again on November 16and December 1. The ISRO’s rocket PSLV-C25 put India’s Mars spacecraft into earth-bound orbit on November 5.
