BENGALURU: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday took to social media to celebrate the completion of 11 years of launch of the Mars Orbit Mission (MOM).
Popularly known as Mangalyaan, the mission was launched by the PSLV- XL- C25 on November 5, 2013 and had reached its destination after nine months. With this mission, ISRO had become the first in the world to have a successful mission in its first attempt, India also became Asia’s first nation to reach the Mars orbit and ISRO became the fourth space agency to reach Mars after the Soviet space programme, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and European Space Agency (ESA), ISRO said on X-platform.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting also took to social media to congratulate the team of researchers. “Celebrating 11 years of the launch of Mars Orbiter Mission- India’s first Interplanetary mission to the Red Planet,” the ministry posted on X-platform.
MOM was termed as a technology demonstrator project to develop technologies that can be used for designing, planning and executing interplanetary missions.
In October 2022, the space orbiter had lost communication with Earth after entering the eclipse period. On October 3, ISRO, released a statement, where it stated that it had lost all communication and all attempts to revive it had failed. After this, ISRO had termed it as dead, reasoning loss of fuel and battery to revive the instruments. The MOM mission was first announced in November 2008, by former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair. The concept report and feasibility study for the same had started in 2010 after the launch of Chandrayaan-1. It was approved by the then prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh in August 2012.