India heads to Mars with budget space mission
It may be cheap at HK$568m, but work-around launch may add to success of 2008 mission
India has begun the countdown to launch its most ambitious and risky space mission to date - sending a probe to Mars, a project conceived in just 15 months on a tiny budget.
After a 2011 Russian-Chinese attempt flopped, India is seeking to make a statement of its technological prowess by becoming the first Asian power to reach the Red Planet more than 200 million kilometres away.
An unmanned probe, weighing 1.35 tonnes and about the size of a large refrigerator, will leave earth strapped to an Indian rocket which is set to blast off from the southeast coast tomorrow afternoon.
Wrapped in a golden film, the orbiter will carry advanced sensors to measure the Martian atmosphere, hoping to detect traces of methane that could help prove the existence of some sort of primitive life form.
"Any interplanetary probe is complex. As we can see for Mars, there were 51 missions so far around the world and there were 21 successful missions," the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), K Radhakrishnan, said.
Undeterred by the failure rates, he laughed off any suggestion of last-minute nerves, saying: "If it is a failure, then learn. Failure is a stepping stone for success."