Mangalyaan: how India reached Mars at its very first attempt

On the morning of 24 September 2014 India did what no country had done before — put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars at the very first attempt. The craft was called Mangalyaan, officially the "Mars Orbiter Mission" (MOM). Built at low cost, in little time and with Indian technology, the mission is still held up around the world as an example.

Mangalyaan at a glance

How did a small rocket reach Mars?

The PSLV is not powerful enough to throw a spacecraft straight towards Mars, so ISRO used a clever method. Mangalyaan was first placed in a long, oval orbit around Earth. Its own engine was then fired several times to raise the orbit step by step — just as a swing goes higher with every push. On 1 December 2013, with the final push, the craft left Earth's orbit and headed for Mars.

About 300 days later, on 24 September 2014, the main engine, silent for months, was fired for about 24 minutes to slow the craft so that Mars's gravity could capture it. The craft did all this by itself, on commands loaded in advance, because at that time a radio signal took about 12 minutes to travel from Earth to Mars.

The "first" and the "most economical"

• India became the first country in the world to reach Mars orbit at its first attempt.
• India also became the first Asian country to reach Mars.
• After the Soviet space agency, NASA and the European Space Agency, ISRO became the fourth agency to reach Mars.
• Its cost was often said to be less than the budget of the Hollywood film "Gravity".

Did you know? The back of the ₹2000 note issued in 2016 carried a picture of Mangalyaan — so the mission even found a place on the country's currency.

A few facts about Mars

• Mars's soil contains iron oxide (a kind of rust), which is why it looks red and is called the "Red Planet".
• The tallest volcano in the solar system, "Olympus Mons", is on Mars — about two and a half times the height of Everest.
• Mars has two small moons — Phobos and Deimos.
• A day on Mars lasts about 24 hours and 37 minutes, almost the same as on Earth.
• Gravity there is about 38% of Earth's — a child who weighs 50 kg on Earth would feel like about 19 kg there.

What did Mangalyaan do?

Mangalyaan's Mars Colour Camera sent back thousands of pictures of Mars, including colour images of the whole planet, dust storms and Mars's moon "Phobos". Other instruments studied the Martian atmosphere and the temperature of its surface. The craft was meant to work for only six months, but it lasted about eight years. Contact was lost in April 2022 — probably because its battery ran out during a long eclipse — and in October 2022 ISRO announced that the mission was over.

Mangalyaan's success opened the way for bigger missions — read the story of Chandrayaan-3 and all of ISRO's major missions.

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