In Pictures

India’s Mars Mission

India marks success of its “staggeringly cheap” space mission to Mars’ orbit, which was reached one year ago.

Mangalyaan 24 sep — Indian scientists and engineers of the Indian Space Research Organization [ISRO] monitor the Mars Orbiter Mission [MOM] at the tracking centre, ISTRAC [Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network], at the Mars Orbiter Mission in Bangalore. [Jagadeesh Nv/EPA]

It has been a year since India’s space probe arrived into Mars’ orbit, making India the only country to have succeeded in reaching the Mars in its first attempt.

With the success of this mission, India secured a place in the elite global space club of Martian explorers.

Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also known as Mangalyaan, launched on November 5, 2013, from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, and journeyed 680 million kilometres and took 300 days to complete the course.

Mangalyaan has been successful in sending data and images during its assignment period of six months, which ended on March 24, 2015.

The scientific objective of the mission includes the exploration of Mars’ surface features, morphology, mineralogy and atmosphere by indigenous scientific instruments.

The Mars Orbiter Mission was achieved on a budget of $74m, nearly a tenth of the amount the US space agency NASA spent on sending the Maven spacecraft to Mars.

Before India, only Russia, the US and the European Space Agency have succeeded in sending spacecrafts to the red planet.

Mangalyaan — India's mission has been budgeted at 4.5 billion rupees [$74m], which, by Western standards, is staggeringly cheap. ISRO's mission cost around 11 percent of NASA's mission to Mars. [ISRO handout/Al Jazeera]