Zee Media Bureau/Liji Varghese
New Delhi: The fourth supplementary orbit raising manoeuvre of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft ‘Mangalyaan’ was successfully completed on Tuesday, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said.
The fourth manoeuvre which was initially carried out on November 11, suffered a small hiccup when the apogee (farthest point to Earth) of the spacecraft could only be raised to 78,276 km from 71,623 km by imparting an incremental velocity of 35 metres/second as against 130 metres/second originally planned to raise apogee to about 100,000 km.
According to the information on the ISRO website, the supplementary orbit raising which started at 05:03:50 hrs (IST) on Nov 12, 2013, with a burn time of 303.8 seconds was successfully completed. The observed change in apogee is from 78276km to 118642km.
The first three orbit-raising operations were completed successfully without any glitches.
India`s ambitious Mars mission was launched into from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota on November 05, 2013.
The orbiter will stay in the Earth`s orbit for 20-25 days trying to build up necessary velocity to break free from the Earth`s gravitational pull.
