India preparing to launch Mars probe

India is preparing to launch a robotic spacecraft towards the Red Planet - a first for the South Asian country, BBC News reported.

The head of India's space agency has said that the mission would demonstrate the technological capability to reach Mars orbit and carry out experiments.

The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) will lift off at 9:08 GMT on Tuesday atop an Indian-built rocket from Sriharikota.

If launch goes well, the spacecraft is set to travel for 300 days and should reach Mars orbit in September 2014.

Officials from the country's space agency began a 56-hour countdown to the launch on Sunday.

Some observers are viewing the launch of the MOM, also known by the informal name of Mangalyaan (Mars-craft), as the latest salvo in a burgeoning space race between the Asian powers of India, China, Japan, South Korea and others.

Prof Andrew Coates, from the UK's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told BBC News: "I think this mission really brings India to the table of international space exploration. Interplanetary exploration is certainly not trivial to do, and [India] has found some interesting
scientific niches to make some measurements in."

Those niche areas include searching for the signature of methane (CH4) in the Martian atmosphere, which has previously been detected from Martian orbit and telescopes on Earth. However, Nasa's Curiosity rover recently failed to find the gas in its measurements of atmospheric gases.

CH4 has a short lifetime in the Martian atmosphere, meaning that some source on the Red Planet must replenish it. Intriguingly, some 95% of atmospheric methane on Earth is produced by microbes, which has led some to propose the possibility of a biosphere deep beneath the Martian surface. But the gas can be produced by geological processes too, most notably by volcanism.

Definitive conclusions are likely to be elusive, but the spacecraft's Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM) instrument will aim to make measurements and map any potential sources of methane "plumes".

The spacecraft will also examine the rate of loss of atmospheric gases to outer space. This could provide insights into the planet's history; billions of years ago, the envelope of gases around Mars is thought to have been more substantial.