BENGALURU: India’s maiden interplanetary mission of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) has completed 1000 earth days in its orbit, today.
ISRO launched the Mars Orbiter on November 5, 2013 through its most successful launch vehicle PSLV and the orbiter was inserted into Martian orbit on September 24 the next year in its first attempt.
ISRO today said that the orbited had performed well beyond its design mission life of six months. 1000 year days correspond to 973.25 Mars Sols (Martian Solar day) and MOM completed 388 orbits.
MOM is credited with many laurels like cost-effectiveness, short period of realisation, economical mass-budget, miniaturisation of five heterogeneous science payloads etc. Satellite is in good health and continues to work as expected. Scientific analysis of the data received from the Mars Orbiter spacecraft is in progress.
ISRO has also launched MOM Announcement of Opportunity (AO) programmes for researchers in the country to use MOM data for research and development. The success of Mars Orbiter Mission has motivated India’s student and research community in a big way. Thirty-two proposals were supported under this AO. A Planetary data analysis workshop was also conducted to strengthen the MOM-AO scientist’s research interest.
First year data from MOM was released to public on September 24, 2016 through ISSDC website. There are 1381 registered users and 370 Gb data has been downloaded.
The Mars Colour Camera, one of the scientific payloads onboard MOM, has produced more than 715 images so far. Mars Atlas was prepared and made available on ISRO website. (AGENCIES)
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