Mangalyaan Completes 100 Days in Mars Orbit

The first day of the New Year saw a milestone being achieved. Mangalyaan which has been orbiting the planet Mars has successfully completed 100 days of its orbit.

This achievement makes India the first country in the world to do this on its very first attempt.

ISRO said that the satellite is functioning well. Later in the day ISRO will be conducting a seminar to analyse the achievements and also the lessons learnt so far from this mission.

Former chairman of ISRO, K Radhakrishnan, said that MOM which has been powered by satellites has paved the path for the rest of the world to get things done differently without necessarily sacrificing on the quality of the mission.

This is India’s very first interplanetary mission to this planet and is actually just a technical one. India happens to be the first country in Asia to send a satellite to Mars making ISRO the fourth space agency in the world.

This craft has been specifically designed to facilitate its orbit around the Red Planet in an elliptical orbit. Developing the technology which is required for a mission like this was one of the main reasons for carrying it out. It was to know the requirements in the field of planning, design, management and also the operations.

India has grabbed the attention of the world by successfully completing this mission at just $74 million which is just a quarter of what was required by the NASA. This may mean that other countries might just turn to India for help in their missions as well.

The Mars Orbiter was also lucky to capture the coma of comet 'Siding Spring' with the a colour camera on board for over 40 minutes as it made an appearance near the Red planet on October 19 last year.
The 1,350kg weighing (on Earth) craft has also taken pictures of one of the two Martian moons -- Phobos, while it was travelling west to east over Mars in its typical orbit.

Some of the pictures it took include the regional dust storm activities over northern hemisphere of Mars, full disc image of the planet, showing Elysium - the second largest volcanic province on the natural satellite. The first set of pictures of Mars sent by the orbiter from space was presented to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a day after the spacecraft entered the Martian orbit.

The spacecraft is now circling the red planet in an orbit whose nearest point to Mars (periapsis) is at 421.7 km and farthest point (apoapsis) at 76,993.6 km. In this orbit, the spacecraft takes 72 hours 51 minutes 51 seconds to go round the Mars once.

It is equipped with five instruments, including a sensor to track methane or marsh gas, a colour camera and a thermal imaging spectrometer to map the surface and mineral wealth of the red planet. MOM was also adjudged one of the 25 innovations made in 2014 by 'TIME' magazine, which described it as a technological feat that will allow India to flex its "interplanetary muscles."

"Nobody gets Mars right on the first try. The US didn’t, Russia didn’t, the Europeans didn’t. But on September 24, India did. That’s when the Mangalyaan …went into orbit around the Red planet, a technological feat no other Asian nation has yet achieved," the magazine said about Mangalyaan, calling it "The Supersmart Spacecraft".