India’s first mission to Mars, which blasted off in November, today successfully entered orbit around the red planet. The safe arrival of the Mangalyaan exploratory satellite marks an historic success for the nation, becoming the first country to enter Mars’ orbit at the first attempt.
Newly installed prime minister Narendra Modi quickly took to TV to congratulate the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and hail the landmark achievement in India’s space program.
#IndiaAtMars | PM #Modi: This accomplishment will go down as a landmark in history http://t.co/4SZJT6Ml62 pic.twitter.com/U56ltjgFbL
— Hindustan Times (@htTweets) September 24, 2014
ISRO’s Mars Orbiter now has a Twitter account (@MarsOrbiter). This is its first tweet, showing a computer-generated selfie (done, of course, by a human on Earth):
What is red, is a planet and is the focus of my orbit? pic.twitter.com/HDRWjOcPus
— ISRO's Mars Orbiter (@MarsOrbiter) September 24, 2014
The Mangalyaan orbiter has five payloads: a Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP), a Mars Color Camera (MCC), the Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM), the Mars Exospheric neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA), and a Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS). It will soon begin taking images of the Martian surface, some of which will be shared on the @MarsOrbiter account as soon as they’re transmitted from the distant craft.
See: A soda company is putting the first ever ad on the lunar surface
The first ever successful Mars mission was NASA’s Mariner 4 back in 1964. India is only the third country to reach Mars.
NASA just tweeted a note of congratulations to ISRO:
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