India became the first nation to reach Mars on its maiden attempt Wednesday when its low-cost Mangalyaan spacecraft successfully entered orbit around the Red Planet after a 10-month journey.
India now joins an elite club of the United States, Russia and Europe who can boast of reaching Mars. More than half of all missions to the planet have ended in failure, including China’s in 2011 and Japan’s in 2003.
No single nation had previously succeeded at its first go, although the European Space Agency, which represents a consortium of countries, did also pull it off at its first attempt.
Now Mangalyaan has reached Mars, the probe is expected to study the planet’s surface and scan its atmosphere for methane, which could provide evidence of some sort of life form.
Mangalyaan is carrying a camera, an imaging spectrometer, a methane sensor and two other scientific instruments.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second smallest planet in the Solar System, after Mercury. Named after the Roman god of war, it is often described as the “Red Planet” because the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance.
It is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, having surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the volcanoes, valleys, deserts, and polar ice caps of Earth.