India's spacecraft Mangalyaan orbits Mars successfully Wednesday Sep 24,2014

 

India's spacecraft orbits Mars successfully – and it cost less to send it there than Hollywood spent on making Gravity (cost £45 million ($74 million), or about three-quarters the amount to make the Oscar-winning movie Gravity about astronauts stranded in space)

 

• Mars Orbiter cost £45 million ($74 million), three-quarters that of Gravity
• It took 300 days to travel more than 420 million miles (670 million km)
• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed it 'near impossible' success
• The spacecraft, called Mangalyaan, will now study red planet's surface
• Spacecraft will study Mars for methane, a key chemical for life on Earth
• Data will help scientists better understand how planets and life evolved

Mangalyaan clicks and sends the first image of Mars

India's Mars Orbiter Mission Mangalyaan has released the first picture of the red planet after successfully entering into the Martian orbit on Wednesday.

The official Twitter handle of ISRO's Mars Orbiter uploaded a picture of our neighbouring red planet with the caption, "the view is nice up here," on Thursday.
The spacecraft is now circling Mars in an orbit whose nearest point to the planet is at 421.7 km.

The Mangalyaan spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Mars this morning, making India the first Asian nation to reach the red planet.

 

It arrived in orbit around the red planet after a tense 300-day marathon travelling more than 420 million miles (670 million km).
 

Indian PM Narendra Modi is seen on a screen as he addresses scientists alongside a graphic of the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft, after the spacecraft successfully entered into the Mars orbit, at the Indian Space Research Organisation's Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore on Wednesday Sep 24,2014

 

"History has been created today. We have dared to reach out into the unknown. And have achieved the near impossible," said Narendra Modi, as India became the first country to succeed in the mission to Mars in its maiden attempt
 

 


Indian scientists and engineers from the Indian Space Research Organisation monitor India's Mars Orbiter Mission

  

A rocket carrying the Indian Mars orbiter taking off from the east-coast island of Sriharikota, India, on November 5, 2013

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists and engineers watch Prime Minister Narendra Modi on screens after the success of Mars Orbiter Mission, in Bangalore on Wednesday, September 24, 2014.
 

 After a 650-million kilometer journey pampered with uncharacteristic attention, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) put itself into orbit around the red planet. That means for the first time a space agency has put a spacecraft around Mars on its first attempt (NASA took two attempts to get so far; the Soviet Union, three)

Disassembled View of the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft
 


In north Chennai, the success of the orbiter was marked by students of Everwin Matriculation Higher Secondary School
 

A comparison of how much countries have spent on their attempts to reach Mars. Both Russia and the US failed their first attempts to Mars, while the Chinese mission to Mars, dubbed Yinghuo-1 mission failed in 2011 and the Japanese mission to Mars ran out of fuel