India - first country to reach mars on it's maiden attempt.

**Astronaut** · 09-22-2014, 07:13 AM

If everything goes well,India is all set to become the first country in the world to reach mars on it's very first attempt.

Missions to mars are fraught with high failure rate,with close to 50% of probes failing en-route.Russia has the dubious distinction of having a failure rate of over 90% with many of it's spacecrafts getting destroyed in earth orbit itself.

Japan,China too attempted to send probes to mars.While the Japanese Nozomi craft came close to reaching the orbit,unfortunately due to many anomalies the probe's panels got destroyed and it's fuel froze resulting in abrupt ending of the mission.In the case of China,it launched a probe along with a Russian sample return mission, but due to technical failure,both were destroyed in earth parking orbit.

The Indian mars orbiter is hurtling towards the planet with a velocity of 22 km/s and exactly on 7:30 am IST on 24th September, it's 440 N thrusts will fire for 30 mins to slow down the spacecraft so that it gets captured by the planet's gravity.The main objective of the mission is to search for signatures of methane,an important life building component.

This is a massive achievement for India.For a country pillaged by the brute empire which saw this once prosperous land turning broke and destitute,so much so that at the time of it's independence in 1947 it didn't even have the capability to manufacture a single piece of staple pin.Right till the 70's India didn't have the technology to build a 2 stroke engine,leave alone a complex rocket engine.Today India is a major player in space science and it's space program is one of the biggest in the world

Since the late 80's India's fortunes have largely reversed after it abandoned socialism and adopted a market economy.Although still a poor country(thanks to a large population),nevertheless it is a dominant player in the field of Information technology,medicine and pharmaceuticals,automobiles,physics,mathematics,as tronomy,military technologies and space science.