India joins elite club of spacefaring nations with successful Mars mission
Alok Jha
Former Science Correspondent
India joined an elite club of spacefaring nations today, when its Mangalayaan spacecraft entered the orbit of Mars.
It is the first time an Asian nation has reached the red planet and India’s space scientists and engineers have also become the first to reach Mars on their first attempt.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) joins the United States, the former Soviet Union and the European Space Agency as the only groups to have successfully sent a probe to Mars.
Mangalayaan, Hindi for “Mars craft” and formally known as the Mars Orbiter Mission, is a 1,350kg probe that was launched from the island of Shriharikota, off India’s eastern coast, almost a year ago.
Read: India sends satellite to Mars
It carries several instruments designed to study the planet’s surface to try and work out what minerals are there. It will also take pictures, scan the atmosphere to look for methane, a gas that is associated with life. Like so many Mars projects before it, part of Mangalayaan’s missions is to hunt for clues of whether the planet might once have supported life in the past.
Sending probes to Mars is not easy. Over the decades, various space agencies have tried more than 50 times to send satellites and landers to Mars and less than half of them have been successful. The “Mars curse” has seen Nasa fail multiple times, the UK lost contact with the Beagle 2 lander in 2003 and, in 2011, China losing the Yinghuo-1 probe, which was launched board the Russian spacecraft Fobos-Grunt but which never left Earth’s orbit after the mission’s rockets failed.
Not only that, India’s mission is significantly cheaper than any other before it. At a cost of around £45m, it is significantly cheaper than Nasa’s £411m Maven probe (which also arrived at the red planet earlier this week) and is even cheaper than the Alfonso Cuaron movie about astronauts getting into trouble in space, the £61m Gravity.
Mangalayaan will do some interesting science - though the scope of its experiments are not in the league of the Nasa and European probes - but its main aim is to show India’s technological prowess to the rest of the world.
The rockets used by Isro were where the space agency managed to cut most of its costs, compared to previous missions, and that launch system will be a useful commercial product for other countries that want to send satellites and scientific missions into Earth orbit.
Spaceflight has traditionally been the preserve of the West but we are now increasingly seeing that focus shift across the world and, most rapidly, to the East.