Article Posted on : - Nov 10, 2013

Mars Orbiter Mission Spacecraft. Photo: ISRO.

CHENNAI (PTI): The third of the total of five orbit raising manoeuvres of the Mars Orbiter spacecraft was performed early Sunday morning, raising its apogee, the farthest point from Earth, to over 71,000 km.

The manoeuvre started at 2:10 AM on Saturday and raised the spacecraft's apogee from 40,186 km to 71,636 km with a burn time of 707 seconds, ISRO said.

The space agency had performed the first two manoeuvres in the last couple of days, in the series of five scheduled on the Mars mission.

The fourth and fifth operations would be performed on November 11 and 16 to raise the apogee to 1,00,000 km and 1,92,000 km respectively.

After the successful completion of these operations, the mission is expected to take on the "crucial event" of the trans-Mars injection around 12.42 AM on December 1.

ISRO's PSLV C 25 successfully injected the 1,350-kg Mangalyaan Orbiter (spacecraft) into orbit around Earth about 44 minutes after a textbook launch at 2.38 PM from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on Tuesday, marking the successful completion of the first stage of the Rs 450-crore mission.