'The Small Bachelor' by P.G. Wodehouse lies on top of two heavy books on technical aspects of the Mars Orbiter Mission on the table. "I need P.G. Wodehouse to destress myself. I have had too many sleepless nights ensuring everything goes smooth with India's mission to Mars,'' says S. Arunan, the project director of Mars Orbiter Mission at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).Arunan is not the only bleary-eyed scientist at ISRO. Roughly one thousand scientists of the 17,000-strong ISRO family are involved in the last lap of the prestigious mission to send a satellite to Mars. No surprise then that inside the ISRO's headquarters at Bangalore, the excitement, tension and nervous energy is in the air. And why not. After all, it is India's first foray far outside the earth's sphere of influence, considering moon is earth's satellite.Chandrayaan I mission to the moon in 2008 may have been a small step by global standards but it was a giant leap for mankind of Indian pedigree. 'Mangalyaan' as the Mars mission is informally referred to, will take India into an altogether different league. It is that pride that is propelling the scientists to ensure nothing, just about nothing, goes wrong.ISRO chairman Dr K. Radhakrishnan is an extremely devout man, known to carry prototypes of the PSLV and spacecraft to different temples to seek divine blessings before a launch. But when I ask him if reaching the Red planet is a dream he has lived with since childhood, he dismisses scientists as a clan of non-dreamers."We do not get into dreams, we get into brass tacks,'' he says, very matter of fact. "You need nerves of steel to make deep space missions a success,'' he says, pointing out that the difference between success and failure is usually just one small component or electrical part malfunctioning. Wiser from the Chandrayaan experience which terminated after nine months, instead of the two years originally envisaged, ISRO is leaving nothing to chance, with an integrated check of the launch vehicle and satellite due this week. Starting Monday, the rehearsal of the launch will commence after the Mission Readiness Review on Friday gives it the green signal for the launch on October 28.The voyage from Sriharikota to Mars will indeed be such a long journey, 400 million km to be precise. This will be the longest distance India will travel as the moon was 4 lakh km away. The flight to Earth's next orbit neighbour will take 300 days, which means it will be in September 2014 when the satellite will start orbiting around Mars. Once it is in orbit, scientists expect it to rotate around Mars for at least six months. The ticket to Mars will cost India Rs 450 crore."This is the cheapest interplanetary mission. Any other country would have spent five times more,'' says Radhakrishnan.There are already five Mars missions in outer space, in active mode. The last of them, NASA's 'Curiosity' reached Mars in August 2012 and it was this satellite that reported that there is no methane - and therefore, no life - on Mars.Which is why this science-cum-technological mission's aim to search for methane on Mars and study Martian environment besides sending to Sriharikota images of the planet's surface is dismissed by G. Madhavan Nair, former chairman of ISRO and India's Moon Man, as an attempt to "fool the public.''Just taking an object to Mars is not a big challenge today. We have already gone beyond earth's gravity to the moon. Besides, NASA already has done the mapping of methane. They have concluded that this might have been the remnants of life forms that existed may be a billion years ago. But today there is no life form and that has been confirmed. So we are not going to add to the scientific value using this sensor," reasons Nair.That is not a criticism fellow scientists are willing to accept. "Do not forget it was Chandrayaan that conclusively proved the existence of water on the moon, despite several other missions that had gone before us and not found water," points out Radhakrishnan."We will be looking at Mars differently from what Curiosity has done. There can always be new findings," says Dr S.K. Shivakumar, Director of the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore.Others point out that the gains are beyond only scientific discovery. It will put India in an exclusive group of nations who have reached the Martian orbit and ensure the country is a partner in any decisions that are sought to be made with respect to Mars in the future.Scientists at ISRO, however, have only the next fifteen months firmly on their horizon. The Indian Deep Space Network located at Bayalalu, 40 km from Bangalore city, has ramped up its facilities to track the Orbiter. During its launch, the mission will also be tracked by ships positioned in the South Pacific Ocean. NASA will provide navigation and tracking support through its facilities in Spain, Australia and the US.ISRO's old workhorse, the PSLV will carry the Orbiter to Mars instead of the GSLV. Madhavan Nair dubs it a compromise and says, "The original Mars mission which we conceived some five or six years before was to go with around 1600 to 1800 kg with a complement of a dozen instruments and then get in to a circular orbit and then carry out observation for one year or so. But that required GSLV as a rocket to launch it. Now since the GSLV problem came, they have tried to take the short cut. So the payload capacity has been reduced to suit the PSLV. The first compromise has been with the orbit. Instead of a circular orbit they are going for an elliptical orbit with some 360 km closest distance (to Mars) and 80,000km as the farthest distance. No remote sensing scientist will suggest such a trajectory.''Admitting GSLV would have been ideal, scientists say PSLV is at least a time-tested vehicle. "For a mission of this character, if I can get a proven vehicle, that is what matters. I don't want to go with an unproven vehicle just to get more extra mass. Question mark on launch should not be there,'' says Shivakumar.When you talk of India, obviously comparisons with China crop up. Dr P.M. Bhargava, former vice chairman of the National Knowledge Commission admits India's neighbour is better placed with regard to deep space research. "Their launch capabilities are larger and they can launch heavier payloads than we can launch. That I think is the only limitation. But in terms of design and deciding what to look for there and experiments, I think we are certainly as good if not better than China," says Dr Bhargava.An interesting aspect of the Mars Orbiter mission is the onboard autonomy that has been incorporated on the satellite. That is because any message that is sent from the control station to the satellite will take 20 minutes to reach and another 20 minutes for the reply to reach back. "So it needs enough artificial intelligence to understand the health of the system on its own," says Radhakrishnan.As the countdown to D-day begins, Mangalyaan is being seen as a project that could do to Indian deep space research, what Aryabhata, the country's first satellite launched in 1975, did to Indian space research then. "From ATMs to predicting cyclones to communication, everything that Indian satellites do today is thanks to the baby step taken by Aryabhata 38 years ago. Mars Orbiter Mission pushes the frontiers once more," says Dr M. Annadurai, project director of Chandrayaan.Mars has been the favourite subject of several science fiction writers. Prof U.R. Rao, former ISRO chairman, who along with writer Arthur Clarke, predicted that Mars could be colonised in another 1000 years, finds this mission akin to India stepping out of the cradle. "We still know so little about space beyond earth. Everything is a mystery. We have to go to Mars and plant bacteria, cacti etc there to create life on that planet. I am optimistic that in another one thousand years, if we are able to create greenhouse effect on Mars, it can be colonised with human civilisation," predicts Rao.If indeed Prof Rao's words come true, at least the first part of 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' will become a reality.