According to the World Bank, more than a quarter of a billion Indians live on $1.25 a day. Still, critics ask how India can venture to Mars when back on Earth,so many of its citizens are in distress. Narasimha, who is the former director of the National Aerospace Laboratory, says that, amortized over the life of the Mars program, it costs each of India's 1.2 billion people about two cents a year, 'or the cost of a cup of roadside tea once every three years,' he says. 'And there are many Indians who will say: 'Why are spending so much money? Seventy million dollars is too much,' ' says Roddam Narasimha, a professor of engineering mechanics at the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research. That's less than it cost to make the $100 million space thriller Gravity. India journeyed to Mars for approximately $70 million.

'This is the first interplanetary probe India.' 'We are taking a new direction,' he says. He says with that ambition, India's space program is about to do what only the space agencies of Russia, the U.S. 'I would say 85 percent of the success is assigned to realization of this objective,' Radhakrishnan says. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, says the mission is more of a test to see if India can take a satellite all the way to Mars and circle the planet. The space probe, the size of small car, will conduct no exotic experiments. NASA put some of its own antennae at India's disposal to track the health of the Mars Orbiter. 'Īdding to the suspense, at that moment Mars will cast a shadow over the spacecraft, blocking communication with ground control.Īn enormous 100-foot-wide satellite dish at India's Deep Space Network has received and transmitted messages to the orbiter as it has hurtled along a 400-million-mile arc to Mars. 'And with that reduced velocity Mars' gravitational influence will be sufficient to bring the satellite into an elliptical orbit. 'That is when we are firing these engines to reduce its velocity,' he says. The carefully calculated maneuver is slated for Wednesday, when Kiran Kumar says the craft is nearest to Mars. Failing that, the probe could shoot past Mars and move into the outer reaches of the solar system.

Plan B is for scientists at the Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organization, India's version of NASA, to fire eight small thrusters to elbow the probe into place. Kumar says the engine will reverse thrust - like a plane does after it touches down - and slow the spacecraft to 2.5 miles per second.

Mars orbiter