Throwing a peanut from Jammu and make it land in Kanyakumari is easier than MOM: Isro

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said that throwing a peanut from an express train, speeding out of Jammu Tawi railway station, in such a way that it should land in the pocket of a captain steering a ferry zipping into the jetty at Kanyakumari, on the bottom tip of the country. That’s simpler than making MOM orbit Mars !

Isro's Facebook page titled “Kashmir to Kanyakumari !”, said, “imagine throwing a peanut from an express train, speeding out of Jammu Tawi railway station, in such a way that it should land in the pocket of a captain steering a ferry zipping into the jetty at Kanyakumari. That’s simpler than making MOM orbit Mars !”

Isro added, even though the course of MOM is mostly set already by the Trans-Mars Injection, we have provisions for fine tuning the trajectory by Trajectory Correction Manoeuvers (TCM).

The first TCM is planned on Tuesday night.

On December 1, India joined interplanetary travelers, after successfully conducting a critical manoeuvre to place the Mars orbiter spacecraft in the Mars transfer trajectory, clearing a critical hurdle in its journey to the red planet, which could not be succeeded by the emerging rival Chinese agency.

On December 11 Isro will conduct first small mid course correction manoeuver, subsequently one will be in April and another one in August next year. “In line with our fetish for jargon, the fancy term coined for these operations is Trajectory correction Manoeuver (TCM) !” Isro said in its public interaction.

MOM is expected to reach Mars in September 2014.

After the successful Trans-Mars injection, MOM is steadily cruising through interplanetary space and is religiously following the desired trajectory. In order to precisely steer MOM to Mars, Isro has planned four mid-course corrections using the 22 N thrusters on board.

Isro also said, the shortest distance between Mars and Earth is 54.6 million km, launching in the shortest route possible to Mars and then, decelerating to match the planet's speed, would require an extremely large amount of fuel. The route which require least amount of fuel is an elliptical orbit which forms a tangent to the Mars' and Earth's Orbit around sun. MOM is traveling a distance of about 680 million km in this elliptical trajectory. This kind of transfer is called a Hohmann transfer, explained Isro.