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Let's go to Mars

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.

A gold-foil-wrapped orbiter standing on its launch adapter between the two open halves of a rocket fairing inside a tall assembly hall, with a service ladder alongside.
The orbiter photographed before encapsulation on its PSLV, the launcher that could not throw it straight to Mars and made it climb out of Earth orbit in seven burns. · Image: Indian Space Research Organisation

India's Mars Orbiter Mission reached Mars at 02:10 UTC on 24 September 2014. A liquid engine idle for 300 days relit and burned about twenty-four minutes, most of it behind the planet and out of contact; ISRO had test-fired it for four seconds two days earlier, to see whether it would light at all.

India's PSLV could not throw the spacecraft straight onto a Mars trajectory, so MOM went up on 5 November 2013 into a high Earth orbit and spent November raising its apogee with six burns — one underperformed and was repeated — before a seventh flung it out of Earth's gravity well on 1 December.

The 13.4-kilogram payload held five instruments: a colour camera, a thermal infrared imaging spectrometer, an exospheric neutral-composition analyser, a Lyman-alpha photometer and a methane sensor. The mission cost about ₹450 crore, roughly 74 million US dollars — less, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out, than the production budget of the film Gravity.

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 touched down but never transmitted. Every single-nation programme before India — Soviet, American, Japanese — had failed at least once, the Soviet Union more than a dozen times.

The deliberately eccentric orbit, about 420 kilometres at closest approach and nearly 77,000 at its furthest, suited full-disc imaging of dust storms and the extended hydrogen corona better than surface mapping; the Mars Colour Camera returned whole-globe views few other spacecraft could take. The methane sensor could not separate methane from carbon dioxide.

MOM was built for six months and worked seven and a half years. In April 2022, propellant exhausted and unable to keep its panels facing the Sun, it hit a run of eclipses longer than its batteries were designed to survive and stopped answering. ISRO declared it over that October.