On September 15 at the auditorium of the Mars mission command and control centre at ISTRAC, some of the key players of this mission addressed the media about the sequence of events leading to the orbit insertion. Orbit insertion will take place 48 hours after NASA's Mars Atmosphere And Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) enters the orbit of the Red Planet on September 22.

ISRO's scientific secretary, V. Koteswara Rao, explained with a detailed power point presentation that on September 24, the insertion exercise will begin at T-3 hours at 4:17 a.m. when MOM will switch over to the medium gain antenna. At 6:56 a.m., 21 minutes prior to the start of the maneuver there spacecraft will rotate forward to point its engine.

Editor's note: all these times are India Standard Time, which is 5.5 hours ahead of UTC and 12.5 hours ahead of California. They are also Spacecraft Event Time, which does not account for the 12.5 minutes it will take for signals to reach Earth. Read this blog entry for a timeline in Earth Received Time for some common time zones. --ESL



The nail-biting moment will be at 7:17 a.m. The burn of the liquid apogee motor has to start and reduce the spacecraft's speed relative to Mars from 22.3 to 4.2 kilometers per second. It has to awaken after "sleeping" for 300 days. The scientists are hoping that it will revive autonomously responding to the commands which were uploaded on September 14 and 15. What is making the scientists nervous is that the burn will begin on the other side of the Red Planet and telemetry will stop at 7:22 a.m. They will receive confirmation that it has "woken up" only at 7:30 a.m. If the signal is positive it will be a moment for celebration. The engine will stop burning at 7:41 a.m. and communication with the spacecraft will be re-established at 7:47 a.m. This is called Plan A and if it is successful, it will be declared at about 8:15 a.m.

The liquid apogee motor will burn for 24 minutes and 14 seconds, consuming 249.5 kilograms of propellant. If everything goes off without a hitch, MOM's orbit around Mars will be an ellipse ranging between 423 and 80,000 kilometers from the surface.