Technicians work on NASA's next Mars-bound spacecraft, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, as it is displayed for the media at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida in this September 27, 2013 file photo. Two new Mars probes are being prepared for launch, both to study what remains of the planet's atmosphere. In its first interplanetary mission, India plans to launch a satellite next week that will scan for methane and NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is scheduled for launch on November, 18 to gather data about what may have happened to Mars' once-thick and water-rich atmosphere. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/files (UNITED STATES - Tags: SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY)

On Tuesday afternoon, the race to conquer the space gets all the more exciting as India gears to blast into space its probe rocket Mangal­yaan.

India will hurtle the Mars Orbiter Mission probe at 2:38 pm from a small island near Chennai from southeast India. The space craft will travel 423 million miles (680 million kilometres), which meant it will take 11 months to reach the atmosphere of Mars.

Conceived in just 15 months on a tiny budget, India definitely had one thing going on its mind when it broached and eventually pushed through with the ambitious plan - to race itself against other formidable Asian economic players, particularly China and Japan, in being the first to reach the red planet. Thus far, only the U.S., Europe and Russia have triumphantly circumnavigated Mars.

India's latest space project cost the country 4.5 billion-rupee ($73 million).

"There is an ongoing race for space-related power and prestige currently in Asia, although few officials will admit it," James Moltz, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, was quoted by Bloomberg News. "India is clearly concerned about China's recent rise in space prestige and wants to minimize that damage."

"India is a major space power today, but it faces competition from countries such as China that have greater resources," Mr Moltz further noted. "It cannot expect to match China mission for mission. But it can develop a solid technical competency in space activities that will help its economy, military, and scientific potential."

An Indian rocket will blast off from the south-east coast on Tuesday afternoon carrying an un unmanned probe, weighing 1.35 tonnes and about the size of a large refrigerator. The orbiter holds advanced sensors that will measure the atmosphere in Mars. India specifically hopes to spot traces of methane gas on the planet.

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Mangalyaan, as the Mars Orbiter Mission is called in India, will circle the Earth for 25 days before proceeding to its nine-month space travel to Mars on Dec 1. It is forecast to reach the red planet orbit on Sept 24, 2014.

"Any interplanetary probe is complex. As we can see for Mars, there were 51 missions so far around the world and there were 21 successful missions," K. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told AFP on Thursday.

However, the ambitious plan has received its fair share of protests from Indian residents and if it will help the country fights its internal financial problems at all.

"Questions are sometimes asked about whether a poor country like India can afford a space program and whether the funds spent on space exploration, albeit modest, could be better utilized elsewhere," Bloomberg quoted Mr Singh as saying in a speech last year. "This misses the point that a nation's state of development is finally a product of its technological prowess."

Compared with Japan's $3.3 billion allocation as well as the U.S.' $17.9 billion, India allots only about $1.1 billion annually on its space programmes.

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