When NASA pitched in as tracker

ISRO and NASA are looking at forging further collaborations in the course of the current mission by ISRO and NASA’s Maven mission.

When ISRO inserted its spacecraft into the orbit of Mars, there was no Indian earth station in contact. Two NASA stations — in Canberra and California — were feeding ISRO’s mission control in Bangalore with crucial data on the progress of the mission. It was only at 11 am that an earth station at Byalalu — the only Indian one capable of receiving deep space communication — began receiving data.

“Because we can observe Mars only for 12 hours we have to get the information from other stations for the other 12. For any inter planetary mission this would be the nature of international collaboration. It is on a commercial basis,” said S Arunan, project director for the creation of the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft.

NASA switched on two antennas in California and two in Canberra. A total of 250 JPL scientists also supported the Indian mission from California and Canberra. It was the Canberra station that first picked up the communication around 8.10 am IST and relayed it real time to ISRO.

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For ISRO, much of the checking of data on position, orbits and manoeuvres also came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “If you see, some of the missions that failed at insertion stage was due to failure in the estimation of the distance from Mars. This occurred in the very early phases of space history,” said ISRO scientific secretary V Koteswara Rao.

ISRO and NASA are looking at forging further collaborations in the course of the current mission by ISRO and NASA’s Maven mission.

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