Mangalyaan-2: ISRO working on the second mission to Mars nine years after MOM’s success

The Indian Space Research Organisation, on a high with the success of Chandrayaan-3, has its eyes set for multiple future missions. It is now seeking to repeat the Mars mission’s success by sending another spacecraft to the red planet. Mangalyaan was one of India’s most savoured successes in space exploration and had made India’s space programme a force to be reckoned with. 

Nine years after Mangalyaan’s success of placing a rocket on the Mars orbit, ISRO is working on the Mars Orbiter Mission-2 aka Mangalyaan-2, to carry four payloads to inspect certain characteristics of the Mars including its atmosphere, environment and the interplanetary dust, according to a report in Hindustan Times. 

The daily that accessed the documents of the mission, quoted an unnamed official, who confirmed that these payloads are in different stages of development. 

MOM-2 will carry a Mars Orbit Dust Experiment (MODEX), a Radio Occultation (RO) experiment, an Energetic Ion Spectrometer (EIS) and a Langmuir Probe and Electric Field Experiment (LPEX), the report added. 

The MODEX will help understand the origin, abundance, distribution and flux at high altitudes of Mars, while the RO experiment will measure neutral and electron density profiles. The EIS under development would help in characterising solar energy particles and supra-thermal solar wind particles of the Mars environment. Last but not the least, the LPEX will help in measuring the electron number density, electron temperature and electric field waves that will shed some light on the plasma environment on Mars. 

Mangalyaan or Mars Orbiter Mission was launched by ISRO on November 5, 2013, and entered Mars orbit successfully on September 24, 2014. With that India became the fourth country to place a spacecraft on Mars orbit, and the first country to do so in the first attempt. It must be mentioned here that the Mars mission was realised only at Rs 450 crore. 

It carried five payloads for a “primarily technological” mission. It carried a Mars Color Camera (MCC), Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS), Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM), Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA), and Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP).

Mangalyaan produced over thousands of images through the MCC, and ISRO published more than 35 research papers in peer-reviewed journals, apart from the key technical and scientific achievements. 

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