India’s Mangalyaan mission, which was initially meant to last six months, has completed five years of orbiting Mars and is likely to continue for more time, ISRO chief K Sivan said today.
In the last five years, India’s first interplanetary endeavour, Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM, helped India’s space agency prepare a Martian Atlas based on the images provided, Sivan said.
Asked about ‘Mangalyaan 2’, Sivan said work is going on and there is no decision on it yet.
The Mars orbiter has sent thousands of pictures totaling two terabytes, an Indian Space Research Organisation (IRSO) official said.
The Mars Colour Camera took close distance images of Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars. MOM is the only Martian artificial satellite that could capture the full disc of Mars in one view frame and also takes images of the far side of Deimos, ISRO said.
The data from MOM helped produce 23 publications in peer-reviewed journals, it added.
An important conclusion of the mission has been the finding that dust storms on the Martian can rise up to hundreds of kilometres, added Mr Sivan’s predecessor AS Kiran Kumar.
The success of Mangalyaan, hailed for being cheaper than the Hollywood movie “Gravity” and much cheaper than NASA’s Maven Orbiter, comes in the wake of ISRO’s setback in the Chandrayaan 2 mission. The Maven Orbiter was similar to India’s Mars mission.