Mangalyaan reaches Mars orbit on the first try
India placed a 15-kilogram science payload in Mars orbit for about 74 million dollars, becoming the first nation to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt.
India's Mars Orbiter Mission reached Mars at 02:10 UTC on 24 September 2014, after a liquid engine that had sat idle for 300 days relit and burned for about twenty-four minutes, most of it behind the planet and out of contact. ISRO had test-fired that engine for four seconds two days earlier, essentially to find out whether it would light at all.
The launcher shaped everything else. India's PSLV could not throw the spacecraft directly onto a Mars trajectory, so MOM went up on 5 November 2013 into a high Earth orbit and spent most of November raising its apogee with six successive engine burns before a seventh flung it out of Earth's gravity well on 1 December. The trajectory was cheap in propellant and expensive in patience, and one of the orbit-raising burns underperformed and had to be repeated.
Everything was scaled to match. The entire science payload weighed 15 kilograms across five instruments — a colour camera, a thermal infrared imaging spectrometer, an exospheric neutral-composition analyser, a Lyman-alpha photometer and a methane sensor. Total mission cost was about ₹450 crore, roughly 74 million US dollars. Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out that this was less than the production budget of the film Gravity, which was true and became the line everyone repeated.
The claim that matters is narrower than the headlines made it. India was the first nation to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt. ESA's Mars Express had succeeded on Europe's first try in 2003, but ESA is an agency of many states and its Beagle 2 lander was lost on the way down. Every single-nation programme before India — Soviet, American, Japanese — had failed at least once first, and the Soviet Union had failed more than a dozen times. Doing it once, on a first attempt, with a launcher too small for the job, is a genuinely hard thing.
The science was modest and ISRO did not pretend otherwise. The orbit was deliberately eccentric, about 420 kilometres at closest approach and nearly 77,000 at its furthest, which suited full-disc imaging of dust storms and the extended hydrogen corona far better than detailed surface mapping. The Mars Colour Camera returned whole-globe views few other spacecraft were positioned to take. The methane sensor never produced a methane detection.
MOM was built for six months and worked for seven and a half years. In April 2022 it entered a run of eclipses longer than its batteries were designed to survive, could not keep its panels facing the Sun with its propellant exhausted, and stopped answering; ISRO declared it over that October. Its real result was demonstrated rather than measured: that interplanetary work was no longer restricted to superpower budgets, and that the number of independent programmes with working hardware at Mars was climbing.