India's mission to Mars reached the Red Planet's orbit on Wednesday, ending its 300-day journey.
Dubbed Mangalyaan, which means "Mars Craft" in Hindi, is the Indian Space and Research Organization's (ISRO) first Mars mission. The spacecraft was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in November 2013.
Mangalyaan will be performing tests and probing the atmosphere of the Red Planet for signs of the greenhouse gas methane. The Earth's atmosphere also has methane content in the form of CH4, or atmospheric methane, which is emitted by living creatures. Previous data collected by telescopes and orbiters provided earlier evidence that methane may also be present in Mars' atmosphere.
The mission traveled a total of 670 million kilometers during its 300-day journey. On Sept. 24, the ground engineers deliberately reduced the spacecraft's speed so it could position itself toward the Red Planet's orbit.
According to The Telegraph, getting a spacecraft to orbit around Mars is a challenging mission. More than half of earlier missions failed their attempts. Although India started late in space exploration, its first shot at getting to the Red Planet was successful. The company only spent roughly $74 million, compared to NASA's $671 million MAVEN probe, making it "the cheapest inter-planetary mission ever to be undertaken by the world."
"India will become the first Asian country to have achieved this and if it happens in the maiden attempt itself, India could become the first country in the world to have reached distant Mars on its own steam in the first attempt," ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan told BBC News.
ISRO's low-cost but highly successful missions are gaining attention from other space research stations around the globe. India's mission to Mars hopes to uncover more information to better understand the Red Planet. The space organization plans to send a follow-up mission with greater scientific payloads to Mars sometime between 2017 and 2020.
