Mars Mission most tracked satellite in the World

India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) today is the most tracked satellite in the World, according to  N2YO, which provides web-based realtime satellite mapping tool tracking many satellites.

It may be noted, three days before the satellite was in the fourth position, among the top 50 most tracked satellites in the World.

According to the website, MOM, which was launched on November 5 by the India Space Research Organisation (Isro), is the most tracked satellites after ISS (ZARYA), of the The International Space Station (ISS).

The result was based on user activity for past 12 hours. It may be noted, this story was filed by this Correspondent at 4.30 p.m IST on Tuesday.

The mapping, as on Saturday afternoon at 4.40 p.m, showed that the spacecraft was somewhere flying over Chad, a landlocked country in Central Africa.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning, Isro successfully completed fourth supplementary orbit raising manoeuvre of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft. It may be noted, on Monday the Mission faced a minor glitch as the fourth manoeuvre fell short of the targeted apogee.

On the Monday the orbit raising manoeuvre was missed since the fuel flow to the engine was affected. Isro Chairman K Radhakrishnan said it was not a worry and will not affect the mission as there is enough cushion is available to address the additional fuel requirement, since the Orbiter spacecraft very precisely into an elliptical orbit around Earth after the launch on November 5.

On Monday, the apogee (farthest point to Earth) of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft was raised from 71,623 km to 78,276 km by imparting an incremental velocity of 35 metres/second, as against 130 metres/second originally planned to raise apogee to about 100,000 km and supplementary orbit-raising operation was planned on Tuesday morning.

gFourth supplementary orbit raising manoeuvre of Mars Orbiter Spacecraft, starting at 05:03:50 hrs(IST) on November 12, 2013, with a burn Time of 303.8 seconds has been successfully completed. The observed change in Apogee is from 78276km to 1,18,642 kms. Velocity added is 124.9 m/s.” said Isro officials.