India is about to launch a spacecraft to find life on Mars

India is preparing everything needed to launch an unmanned spacecraft to Mars in November, an official announced.

Professor UR Rao, an expert of the Management Council of the Indian Department of Physics Research, said the preparations are going on very quickly. The ship that India is about to launch will search for life on the red planet.

"The ship will fly 299 days before arriving in Mars in September 2014," Xinhua quoted Rao.

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Mangalyaan Mars , the name of the spacecraft, will fly from Sriharikota space launch station in southern India. It will fly around Mars and photograph the surface of the planet, not landing like an American Curiosity device.

Currently, engineers at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) are installing equipment into the Mangalyaan spacecraft. The government has only approved the launch of ships to Mars in the second quarter of last year, making ISRO only one and a half years to build ships.

But on the other hand, ISRO could not delay the launch of Mangalyaan, because in November this year, Mars will get closer to Earth than any other month of the year. So, if the spacecraft leaves Earth in November, its flight time to Mars will be the shortest. The shorter the flight time, the lower the cost of the flight.

Experts say that if ISRO cannot launch ships to Mars this year, they will have to wait for the same opportunity in a few years.