On Sept. 24, 2014, India's first interplanetary mission entered into orbit around Mars!
The Indian Space Research Organisation's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called Mangalyaan (Sanskrit for "Mars Craft"), spent 10 months getting to Mars after it launched. It was mostly a technology demonstration that India's space agency orchestrated to prove they could send a spacecraft to Mars. But it also has some cameras and scientific instruments to collect data about the Red Planet.
India launched its Mars orbiter mission on Nov. 5, 2013 atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle primarily as a demonstration mission to show that the ISRO could build a spacecraft capable of reaching the Red Planet. The $74 million mission was designed to snap photographs of Mars and study the planet's atmosphere for up to 10 months, but did perform science for over a year and continued to orbit the Red Planet through October 2022.
The orbiter's science orbit circled Mars on an extreme path, approaching as close as 227 miles (365 kilometers) and extending as far out as 49,710 miles (80,000 km). It takes the spacecraft about 77 hours to complete one orbit.
Why it mattered
The Mars Orbiter Mission, better known as Mangalyaan in India, was a phenomenal feat of engineering for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). With the probe's arrival in Mars orbit, India became just the fourth country to successfully orbit the Red Planet at the time, after the United States, Russia (then the Soviet Union) and the European Space Agency. (The United Arab Emirates and China would follow years later, both in 2021.)
Not only was it India's first Mars mission, but it was the country's first interplanetary mission and achieved on a miniscule budget when compared other Mars missions (NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter, which arrived at the Red Planet within weeks of Mangalyaan, cost an estimated $671 million at liftoff). India was so proud of its Mars orbiter that the country put the spacecraft on a 2000-rupee bank note in 2016.
The Mangalyaan Mars orbiter ultimately spent eight years studying Mars from orbit, capturing detailed images of the Red Planet. Its instruments included a color camera, a thermal infrared sensor, an ultraviolet spectrometer and a mass spectrometer to study (both to study particles in the Martian atmosphere).
In October 2022, ISRO lost contact with its Mars orbiter, likely because it had run out of fuel keep its solar arrays aimed at the sun to generate power.
"The mission will be ever-regarded as a remarkable technological and scientific feat in the history of planetary exploration," ISRO officials said at the end of the mission.
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