What were the major phases of the Mangalyaan mission?

Have you seen a film hero leap out of a moving car, and dash across the platform to board a running train? Don’t ever do it, because nothing can be more dangerous! For our spacecraft, they have no other choice. Because both their home and destination planets are racing around the Sun without ever stopping! To execute such a terrifying transit, different spacecraft use different manoeuvres. Mangalyaan did it in three phases – geocentric, heliocentric and areocentric phases.

In the first phase, Mangalyaan was carried by its rocket into an orbit around the Earth. Then by firing the spacecraft’s main engine in seven, carefully-planned stages, Mangalyaan’s orbit was made more and more elliptical, until it broke free of the Earth’s gravitational pull. The final firing launched Mangalyaan on a Sun-centric curved path to Mars, tangential to both planets. This space cruise stage from the Earth to Mars formed the second phase of the mission. The third phase began about ten months later with a precisely-timed manoeuvre, called Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI). The engines were fired once again to reduce the velocity of Mangalyaan just enough so that the gravitational field of Mars would pull the spacecraft into an orbit around it.

Picture Credit : Google

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