Isro eyes mission to Mars in 6 years

After the challenging mission to moon, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said on Wednesday it has begun preparations for sending a spacecraft to Mars within the next six years.

The government has sanctioned seed money of Rs 10 crore to carry out various studies on experiments to be conducted, route of the mission and other related details necessary to scale the new frontier, said Isro Chairman G Madhavan Nair.

“Already mission studies have been completed. Now we are trying to collect scientific proposals and scientific objectives,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a day-long workshop of the Astronautical Society of India.

He said the space agency was looking at launch opportunities between 2013 and 2015. Chandrayaan-I, the country’s maiden unmanned moon mission, appears to have fired the imagination of young scientists and Isro plans to tap this talent for its mission to Mars.