NEW DELHI/ Bangalore: Marking a red-letter day in Indias leap into unknown frontiers well beyond the literal limits of time or space, India created history on Wednesday, 24 September, by becoming the first country to succeed on its first Mars mission when the Indian Space Research Organisations (ISRO) Mangalyaan slipped into Martian orbit.
Successfully capping a mission in which more than half the world’s previous attempts – 23 out of 41 Mars missions – have failed, including attempts by Japan in 1999 and China in 2011, India joined a small, elite club of Martian explorers- United States, European Space Agency and the former Soviet Union with the Mars Orbiter Mission, affectionately called MOM.
An elated Prime Minister of India- Narendra Modi on deck as a witness, at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore said, “History has been created! We’ve dared to reach out into the unknown and achieved the near impossible.
Aaj MOM ka Mangal se milan ho gaya, aur Mangal ko MOM mil gayi,” (in a word-play on mangal which in Hindi means Mars but also translates to welfare, Modi said, today MOM has met Mars and found joy, likewise Mars has also found its MOM) the PM said congratulating scientists from ISRO for putting India on the world map of space exploration and becoming the first to have a successful Mars mission on debut.
That India might be the first nation to tell the world about the presence of methane on Mars despite all odds having been against us, he said is proof that our scientists can challenge anybody in the world.
“And this, we must remember has come from our ancestors who’d given the world Zero, predicted eclipses accurately, discover planetary positions. Today we’ve honoured our ancestors and inspired our next generation,” he said. “We must use our science to better governance, achieve economic growth and deliver the fruits of our development to people it’s never reached in the past, Mr. Modi said.
Mangalyaan, which relies on homegrown technology, is a remarkably low budget mission of about $75 million. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or Maven, which reached its position around the Red Planet only days earlier on Sunday, 21 September, has a price tag of $671 million – nearly nine times that of MOM’s.
Scientists at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory had wished their Indian counterparts luck a day ago. Good luck MOM. From your JPL family, read the message posted on ISROs Facebook page.
India has said its spacecraft is chiefly meant to showcase the country’s high-tech space abilities. Already, India has successfully launched a lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, which discovered key evidence of water on the Moon in 2008.
MOM’s scientific goals including using five solar-powered instruments to gather data that will help determine how Martian weather systems work and what happened to the water that is believed to have once existed on Mars in large quantities. It will also search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes.
None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist. Some of the data will complement research expected to be conducted by Maven.
The spacecraft is expected to circle the planet for at least six months, following an elliptical orbit that gets within 365 kilometers (227 miles) of the planet’s surface at its closest and 80,000 kilometers (49,700 miles) at its farthest.
Nasa congratulated India in a Twitter message, welcoming MOM to studying the Red Planet.
Curiosity Rover, Nasas mission to explore the surface Mars, greeted ISROs Mars Orbiter for its success. Curiosity Rover welcomed Mars Orbiter into its horizon- Curiosity Rover @MarsCuriosity: Namaste, @MarsOrbiter! Congratulations to @ISRO and India’s first interplanetary mission upon achieving Mars orbit.
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