Chennai, India’s Mars Orbiter spacecraft has sent five pictures of the red planet’s surface, said a senior official of the Indian space agency.
“The Mars Orbiter has started sending pictures. We have received five pictures and these are under processing,” an official of Indian Space Research Organisation told Here, preferring anonymity.India Wednesday created space history by becoming the first country in the world to place a spacecraft in Mars’ orbit in the first attempt.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the event as “achieving the near impossible” and called for challenging the next frontier.India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) traversed over 650 million km distance through deep space for over nine months to reach the Red Planet’s orbit.
“The spacecraft (Orbiter) successfully entered the Martian orbit at 7.55 a.m. and is located at about 515 km from its surface…,” a senior space official told IANS at the mission control centre here.
Radars at the earth stations of NASA at Goldstone in the US, Madrid in Spain, Canberra in Australia and India’s own deep space network at Baylalu near Bangalore received the radio signals from the Orbiter, confirming its insertion into the Mars orbit.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who witnessed the event from an Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) facility in Bangalore, heartily congratulated the ISRO scientists and said that the successful Mars mission “must become a base for challenging the next frontier”.
The success “will go down as landmark in history”, said a visibly delighted Modi.
India’s Mars mission is “a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation” and we have gone beyond boundaries of human enterprise and imagination, he added.
The prime minister said that the MOM was built “indigenously, in a pan-Indian effort” and added that India is the only country to have succeeded in its very first attempt.
“With today’s spectacular success, ISRO joins an elite group of only three other agencies worldwide to have successfully reached the Red Planet,” he added amidst applause.Modi, wearing a red coloured jacket, said that the “odds were stacked against us”.“Of the 51 missions attempted across the world so far, a mere 21 had succeeded. But we have prevailed,” he said.
He went on: “Travelling an incredible distance, of over 650 million or 65 crore km, we have gone beyond boundaries of human enterprise and imagination.”The success of the Mars mission has made India join the elite club of the US, Europe and Russia, which reached the second smallest planet of our solar system after initial failures.
The state-run ISRO became the fourth international space agency after National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US, Russian Federal Space Agency (RFSA) and European Space Agency to have undertaken successful missions to Mars.India also became the first Asian country to have entered the Mars sphere of influence (gravity) Tuesday, as a similar mission by China failed in 2011..(Source- www.newsroompost.com)
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