Will there be a second Indian mission to Mars?
Call it the seed of a concept, wish or dream, a Mars-2 mission by the Indian Space Research Organisation that will “land” on the red planet looks highly probable. Only last month the agency put its spacecraft around a Mars orbit in its first attempt.
Technically, 2018 appears to be the next best time to go for a second Indian Mars trip. An opportunity to go to Mars from Earth comes up every 26 months; the next date, 2016, is believed to be too soon for ISRO and not conducive.
The Indian Mars Orbiter Mission of 2013-14 should have a successor, but “it is not an active thought nor is it in the realm of any planning yet,” says S.K. Shivakumar, Director of the ISRO Satellite Centre.
At a news conference on Wednesday to announce a three-day engineers’ conclave on future space technologies co-hosted by ISRO, Mr. Shivakumar said, “Much maturity has come after we succeeded in [Mars-1].”
But nothing like that is on the ISRO drawing board, he clarified adding the think-tank ADCOS (Advisory Committee for Space Science) would review any such proposal and suggest more advanced experiments than on MOM.
Mr. Shivakumar said Mars-2 could happen after the revamped second moon mission was launched; this looked likely in “around two years.”
