India Gets to Mars on the First Try – MOM’s the Word

September 25, 2014

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September 25, 2014 – India has done something no other space-faring nation could achieve. Their Mars Orbiter Mission, known as MOM entered orbit around Mars on September 23rd after a successful orbital insertion burn. The milestone achieved – successful on the first try. Russia, the United States, the European Space Agency and Japan cannot make the same claim.

MOM joins MAVEN, the NASA orbiter that arrived just two days prior. The contrasts between these two missions to Mars couldn’t be greater.

MAVEN cost $671 million USD. MAVEN will study the Martian environment and atmosphere in an attempt to reconstruct its history from warm and moist some 4 billion years ago to today’s cold desert. It will do this using a scientific package containing nine sensors designed to monitor solar radiation, rate of atmospheric loss, and the highly variable planet’s magnetic fields.

MOM cost between $74 and 78 million, about one-ninth the cost of MAVEN. MOM’s work is in many ways far more interesting if you are seeking signs of microbial life on Mars. That’s because MOM will study methane in the Martian atmosphere. Whiffs of methane have been detected by other Martian orbiters. Curiosity, however, has not detected methane in Gale Crater. So is methane on Mars a geological or biological phenomenon? MOM may help answer that question. The rest of the instrumentation on MOM is designed to study Martian weather and map the mineral composition of the planet’s surface.

One thing MAVEN doesn’t have is a camera. MOM does and will take colour pictures of the planet surface. India released the first image taken yesterday, reproduced below.

For India’s ISRO the success of MOM represents an extraordinary technological achievement, one the country hopes to duplicate before the end of the decade by starting its own human spaceflight program. It seems in the 2020s near-Earth orbit will be an ever more crowded bit of space. And who knows, maybe those NASA time frames on human space flight to Mars may be moved forward with more nations and commercial operators joining the race to space.