Mars Orbiter Mission

• 1. Introduction

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  Mars Orbiter Mission, known informally as Mangalyaan, slipped into orbit around Mars on the 24th of September 2014, after traveling 780 million kilometers through space. India had done what no Asian nation had ever done. The Indian Space Research Organisation had become only the fourth space agency in history to reach Mars, joining the Soviet space program, NASA, and the European Space Agency. And it had done so on its very first attempt. The mission cost approximately 450 crore rupees. Prime Minister Narendra Modi noted that worked out to roughly 7 rupees per kilometer, cheaper than a 10-rupee-per-kilometer auto ride in Ahmedabad. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a nation build an interplanetary spacecraft in 15 months, what did it find when it got there, and what finally brought it down?

• 2. Built in Record Time

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  Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave formal approval for the project on the 3rd of August 2012, and the clock started. ISRO had a narrow window. Launch opportunities for the fuel-saving Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars occur only every 26 months, meaning the next chances after 2013 would fall in 2016 and 2018. Miss 2013, and the program would wait years.

  The development was fast-tracked using a reconfigured Chandrayaan-2 orbiter bus, the same structural lineage as India's lunar orbiter that had flown in 2008. Assembly of the PSLV-XL launch vehicle, designated C25, began on the 5th of August 2013. The five scientific instruments were mounted and integrated at U. R. Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, and the finished spacecraft was shipped to Sriharikota on the 2nd of October 2013 for mating to the rocket. The satellite's development, from approval to launch readiness, was completed in a record 15 months.

  ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan attributed the low cost to a modular approach, fewer ground tests, and working days that stretched to 18 or 20 hours. S. K. Shivakumar, Director at the ISRO Satellite Centre, led the conceptualization and design. Nandini Harinath and Ritu Karidhal both served as Deputy Operations Directors of Navigation. Moumita Dutta managed the project. The team that built Mangalyaan did so with the knowledge that a single missed window meant starting over half a decade later.

• 3. The Road to Mars Orbit

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  ISRO had originally planned to launch on a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, but the GSLV had failed twice in 2010 and its cryogenic engine remained unreliable. Switching to the less powerful Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle meant the spacecraft could not be placed directly onto a Mars-bound path. Instead, engineers designed a sequence of burns in Earth orbit to gradually build up enough velocity.

  The launch took place at 09:08 UTC on the 5th of November 2013 from the First Launch Pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh. A one-week delay had already been absorbed when a crucial telemetry ship was late reaching its position near Fiji because of poor Pacific weather. Once in orbit, the spacecraft's 440-newton liquid engine was fired six separate times over ten days, steadily pushing the apogee from 23,550 km out to 192,874 km. The fourth burn fell short when both primary and redundant coils of the solenoid flow control valve were energized simultaneously, causing the engine to stop. An unscheduled supplementary burn on the 12th of November recovered the shortfall.

  On the 30th of November 2013 at 19:19 UTC, a 23-minute engine firing sent MOM out of Earth orbit entirely and onto a heliocentric path. The probe needed only three of four planned trajectory corrections en route. The final correction, on the 22nd of September 2014, was a deceleration test lasting just 3.9 seconds. Then, on the 24th of September 2014, the 440-newton apogee motor fired for 1,388.67 seconds and Mars captured the spacecraft. ISRO had become the first national space agency to reach Mars orbit with an indigenously developed propulsion system.

• 4. Five Instruments, Mixed Results

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  The 15-kilogram scientific payload distributed across five instruments represented a careful balance between ambition and budget. The Mars Colour Camera, weighing 1.27 kg, was the instrument most visible to the public. It captured the first global view of Mars on the 28th of September 2014, just four days after orbit insertion. By the 5th anniversary of the mission in September 2019, the camera had sent back 2 terabytes of imaging data. On the 1st of July 2020, it photographed the Martian moon Phobos from 4,200 km away, and on the 18th of July 2021 it captured a full-disc image from roughly 75,000 km altitude with a spatial resolution of about 3.7 km per pixel.

  The Methane Sensor for Mars was the most scientifically ambitious and the most disappointing instrument on board. It was designed to detect methane in the Martian atmosphere, a gas associated with biological and geological activity on Earth. After reaching Mars orbit, engineers discovered a design flaw in how the spectrometer processed data. Instead of transmitting discrete spectral lines, it sent the sum of sampled spectra, making it impossible to isolate the methane signal from interference by carbon dioxide. The instrument was repurposed as an albedo mapper, measuring the reflectivity of the Martian surface in the short-wave infrared range.

  The Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser, at 3.56 kg the heaviest of the five instruments, traced its heritage directly to the Chandra's Altitudinal Composition Explorer payload that had flown on India's Moon Impact Probe during the Chandrayaan-1 mission. In December 2014, during four orbits when the spacecraft flew closest to Mars, MENCA recorded suprathermal populations of argon-40 in the Martian exosphere at altitudes around 250 km, with an exospheric temperature near 275 K on most orbits but exceeding 400 K on two. Those first results were published in Geophysical Research Letters in March 2016.

• 5. Eight Years, Then Silence

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  At the end of orbit insertion on the 24th of September 2014, MOM carried 40 kg of propellant on board, twice the 20 kg deemed necessary for a six-month mission. The spacecraft was still healthy when it completed its initial six-month mission on the 24th of March 2015; ISRO extended it by another six months and then kept extending. On the 19th of May 2017, MOM reached 1,000 days in orbit, having completed 388 orbits and returned more than 715 images.

  Longer eclipses became the key constraint as years passed. On the 17th of January 2017, ISRO burned eight 22-newton thrusters for 431 seconds, spending 20 kg of propellant and leaving only 13 kg on board, specifically to adjust the orbit and avoid eclipses until September 2017. The battery could handle eclipses of up to 100 minutes.

  In April 2022, MOM entered an eclipse period lasting seven hours. Nothing in its design allowed it to survive that long without sunlight to recharge. Communications were lost. At an ISRO conference on the 27th of September 2022 marking eight years since Mars orbit insertion, engineers discussed what had happened. The spacecraft had run out of the propellant needed to adjust its attitude and keep its solar panels and antenna correctly oriented. On the 2nd of October 2022, the loss was publicly reported. The following day, ISRO officially declared the mission over. ISRO released a statement confirming that all attempts to revive MOM had failed.

  The Mars Orbiter Mission team had already received the National Space Society's 2015 Space Pioneer Award in the science and engineering category. ISRO's planned follow-up, a Mars Lander Mission with a greater scientific payload and an aerobraking capability, was being developed with a target launch in 2027.