It has intrigued some people as to why a country should spend Rs 450 crore to sniff around another planet. But in scientific quests, where cost-benefits rarely satisfy the accountants, economics takes a back seat.

When India began work on its lunar mission, Chandrayaan, it used to be said that unless you put your foot in, you wouldn’t be able to claim a stake for the spoils later. Moon abounds in this rare element called Helium-3, said to be an excellent source of clean fuel. So, Chandrayaan had its economic objectives lurking just beneath the surface.

Not so the Mars mission. It is more for image building – the benefits of which will not be immediately apparent. But a successful Mars mission will raise the country’s stature.

For the mission is of unprecedented complexity. It is for the first time that a made-in-India object will leave the earth’s ‘sphere of influence’. Never before has an India-made satellite travelled that far into space – the Mars Orbiter’s will travel 400 million km to reach its destination, though the destination itself is only 55 million km away.

(This is because it has to take a route around the sun. On the earth, vehicles pick up speed by burning more fuel. In space, the speed is supplied by the gravitational forces of celestial objects and vehicles’ routes are chartered in order to get the best out of these forces.)

If India gets it right on Tuesday, it will be one-up over China and Japan. China, which has achieved the watermark of sending a man into space and getting him back to earth safely, launched its first Mars probe (Yinghuo 1) in November 2011. The probe was lost in space in a week. Japan sent a Mars probe, Nozomi, in July 1998 but the mission was not successful.

S.K. Das, an Advisor to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), in his recent book on Mars, notes that in the last five decades as many as 42 Mars probes have been failures. The first Mars probe – by the erstwhile Soviet Union, called Project 1M, in 1959 was a failure.

Das notes that the failure rate of the Mars missions has been so high that it is attributed to a ‘Martian Curse’.

The Time magazine once playfully theorised that there lives a big monster between Earth and Mars, which it called ‘Great Galactic Ghoul’ that feeds on the probes sent from Earth.

The real reason for the failures, of course, is the complexity of the missions. Only the US, Europe and Soviet Union have successfully sent their probes to the red planet. That is why getting it right will be for India a huge game changer.

> ramesh.m@thehindu.co.in

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