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PANAJI: The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has scheduled its mission to orbit Mars sometime between 2013 and 2015, Isro scientists

said on Monday.

Speaking to the media after the inaugural of the Eight International Conference on Low Cost Planetary Missions here, Isro chairperson G Madhavan Nair said that international space agencies have also been invited to join in conducting experiments in outer space.

“We have given a call to international agencies to submit their proposals. We will be able to plan our mission depending on the type of experiments they propose to conduct,” he said. The Mars Orbiter will explore the red planet with regard to the effect of solar wind, studies of its surface magnetic field and a search for palaeowater (groundwater that has remained in an aquifer for millennia).

“This mission is still at the conceptual stage. We get an opportunity to conduct a Mars mission only once in two years and we have scheduled ours between 2013 and 2015,” Nair said. He said that efforts would be made to bring down the cost of the Mars mission, as was done with the Chandrayaan-1 mission, which cost less than $100 million. However, there are other plans for the near future. Nair said India is scheduled to launch Astrosat, a satellite-based orbiting astronomical laboratory next year.

The Astrosat mission will involve sending a satellite with a state-of-the-art observatory and will facilitate the study of astrophysical objects ranging from nearby solar system objects to distant stars and objects at cosmological distances.