[Jeroen]

Good for them. Would be interesting to get a bit of insight what really happened. We reallly don't get any insights into what happened and how it was fixed and whether it will have any impact on the remaining part of the fllght, enhance risk or so for the remainder.

I can find very little technical details on this Indian Mars mission.

Read somewhere that more missions to Mars have failed than succeeded. Be that as it may, it is how you explore new worlds. Something fails, you learn from it and try and avoid it next time. But if anyting it does show how immature space exploration still is.

Jeroen

[Gansan]

It seems they were simultaneously testing the redundancies built in to the propulsion system, when the fuel flow to the engine stopped.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission

[AlphaKilo]

Thanks Gansan sir.

As mentioned in the above post, there was a testing of redundancy in the coils of flow control valve for the 440 N thrusters, when the glitch (not a failure as some news papers have been quoting) occured and the on-board FDIR (failure detection, isolation and recovery) system automatically kicked in and corrected the issue.

Lesson learnt: Primary and Redundant coils for 440N thrusters cannot be used in parallel, rather only sequentially.

Jeroen: Sad part is ISRO has a dedicated MOM page but even that seems to be a day old in terms of actual information. Hope they get a good IT team who are swift to update the info.

P.S: I am not associated with ISRO directly.

Quoting from the official website:

In the fourth orbit-raising operation conducted this morning (Nov 11, 2013), the apogee (farthest point to Earth) of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft was raised from 71,623 km to 78,276 km by imparting an incremental velocity of 35 metres/second (as against 130 metres/second originally planned to raise apogee to about 100,000 [1 lakh] km). The spacecraft is in normal health. A supplementary orbit-raising operation is planned tomorrow (November 12, 2013) at 0500 hrs IST to raise the apogee to nearly 1 lakh km.

During the orbit-raising operations conducted since November 7, 2013, ISRO has been testing and exercising the autonomy functions progressively, that are essential for Trans-Mars Injection (TMI) and Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI).

During the first three orbit-raising operations, the prime and redundant chains of gyros, accelerometers, 22 Newton attitude control thrusters, attitude and orbit control electronics as well as the associated logics for their fault detection isolation, and reconfiguration have been exercised successfully. The prime and redundant star sensors have been functioning satisfactorily. The primary coil of the solenoid flow control valve was used successfully for the first three orbit-raising operations.

During the fourth orbit-raising operations held today (November 11, 2013), the redundancies built-in for the propulsion system were exercised, namely, (a) energising the primary and redundant coils of the solenoid flow control valve of 440 Newton Liquid Engine and (b) logic for thrust augmentation by the attitude control thrusters, when needed. However, when both primary and redundant coils were energised together, as one of the planned modes, the flow to the Liquid Engine stopped. The thrust level augmentation logic, as expected, came in and the operation continued using the attitude control thrusters. This sequence resulted in reduction of the incremental velocity.

While this parallel mode of operating the two coils is not possible for subsequent operations, they could be operated independently in sequence.

http://www.isro.gov.in/pressrelease/...spx?Nov11_2013

[Jeroen]

On a lighter note; not everybody is enthusiastic about this Mars mission.

[AlphaKilo]

16-11-2013

• The fifth orbit raising manoeuvre of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft, starting at 01:27 hrs(IST) on Nov 16, 2013, with a burn Time of 243.5 seconds has been successfully completed.The observed change in Apogee is from 118642km to 192874km.

http://isro.gov.in/mars/updates.aspx

Good to see this positive update! Hopefully the next one will also be glitch free before the free coast towards Mars.

[AlphaKilo]

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasat...l#.UopKkeIwLXh

Launch of MAVEN (live) - Pacific time 1328hrs on 18.11.2013. Launch picture perfect.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ma.../#.UopoU8QjL1I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh_nyFIwPy0

[AlphaKilo]

The first colour image from MOM:

http://isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/Imagegal...images/mom.png

Spatial resolution of 3.5km. One can also see some storm clouds over bay of Bengal and the coast of chennai.

[mazda4life]

My son and I keenly follow the Solar Impulse as the team attempts to circumnavigate the globe on a solar powered aircraft, you can track the progress online here http://www.solarimpulse.com/leg-8-from-Nagoya-to-Hawaii , I took a screenshot from the flightradar and I am so excited on the adventure that the team has undertaken, kudos to the team and the sponsors.