India’s Mars mission completes six months, gets 6 months extension

24 Mar 2015

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India's Mars Orbiter Mission `Mangalyan' will continue to explore the Red Planet and its atmosphere for another six months after the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on Tuesday extended the life of the spacecraft after it completed six months in orbit.

The low-cost, frugal Mars mission has still enough fuel to complete another six months of orbiting Mars for another six months, an Isro official said on Tuesday.

The 1,340 kg Mars Orbiter, India's maiden mission to Mars, was originally designed to orbit the planet for a six-month period, but the satellite could last longer in the Martian orbit mainly due to its low fuel consumption.

Mangalyaan needs about two kg of fuel every year for effective orbit maintenance. The satellite, however, has about 37 kg of fuel left, which can easily help it last many years in the Martian orbit.

But, the question is will Mangalyaan's sub-systems survive the high radiation environment and the long eclipses the satellite faces.

As of now, all five scientific instruments onboard Mangalyaan are working well, and the satellite is going strong. It has also taken breathtaking images of extinct volcanoes, deep valleys and high mountains and beamed them some 200 million km back to Earth.

These will continue to collect data and relay it to Isro's deep space network centre for analysis, Isro director Devi Prasad Karnik said.

Of the five payloads onboard, the Mars Colour Camera (MCC) has been most active, taking several stunning images of the red planet's surface and its surroundings, including valleys, mountains, craters, clouds and dust storms.

India successfully paced its Mars spacecraft in an orbit around the Red Planet on 24 September 2014, in its very first attempt, on a shoe-string budget of Rs450-crore, breaking into an elite club of three countries.

India's success comes after European, American and Russian probes managed to orbit or land on the Mars after several attempts, the first Chinese Mars mission, called Yinghuo-1, failed in 2011 and a 1998 Japanese mission ran out of fuel and was lost.

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