India’s Mars orbiter (Image: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)

With the successful launch just hours ago of its Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), India has passed the first test in its bid to orbit the Red Planet. Next up is a nail-biting ride to Mars, which, as history shows, is fraught with danger.

Not only would a successful mission be a towering achievement, it will also provide vital technological know-how that should aid India’s next planned mission: a robotic voyage to the moon, which may be even more exciting, scientifically speaking, than MOM.

The orbiter launched at 14:38 local time from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, near Chennai. The plan is for the craft to remain in Earth orbit until 30 November, when it will be sent on its way to Mars.


History points to a difficult journey ahead. Despite the success of NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, which landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, Mars is a notoriously tough target – even for spacecraft that are designed to orbit, not land.

Of the five other space agencies that have launched orbiters to Mars, just one – the European Space Agency – made it on the first attempt (see diagram, below). Only two more – NASA and the USSR – have ever made it to the planet. Despite attempts by the Japanese and Chinese space agencies, no Asian nation has ever succeeded in orbiting, let alone landing on, the Red Planet. “It’s a stretch goal,” Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC, told New Scientist.

All this means that if India makes it to Mars, it will have conquered the “Mount Everest of space”. But what will the mission contribute to science?

Compared to projects like NASA’s Curiosity rover or its upcoming MAVEN orbiter, which will be studded with science gear, MOM is a small probe carrying just five instruments. The most interesting of these is its methane sensor, which could help to settle a debate over whether or not methane previously detected on Mars is a sign of life.

But the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) argues that the goals for its Mars mission are mostly technological, showing that they have the know-how to design and navigate a deep-space probe. No matter how the probe fares from here, what India learns from its Mars mission should add to the capabilities of their next attempt to reach the moon, Chandrayaan-2.

India launched its debut moon orbiter Chandrayaan-1 in 2008 with only partial success: after less than 10 months in orbit, the $80 million mission lost contact with the radio dishes in Bangalore, India, used to communicate with it. But the nation’s next lunar project is slated to be the first fully robotic mission to bundle an orbiter, a lander and a rover into a single launch, all developed by India. ISRO has said that the craft will test out novel technologies and science instruments.

Next stop, the moon

How will MOM help with the future moon mission? One of the trickiest phases in any interplanetary trek is launching and then perfecting orbital trajectories between Earth and your destination.

India’s Mars shot offers a chance to refine their techniques for climbing out of Earth orbit and heading deeper into space. “They are going to be orbiting the Earth for some extended period of time, checking the spacecraft out before they commit to injecting it on a Mars trajectory. One of the issues there is the accuracy of their navigation and their ability to get it on the right trajectory,” says John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute in Washington DC.

With lessons learned from MOM, plus another attempt in December at flying the heavy-lift rocket that will eventually launch the moon probe, India should be better placed for success when Chandrayaan-2 is ready for take-off.

“Any time you fly a planetary mission you are going to learn something, like how to improvise when things don’t go as planned,” says Paul Spudis at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who assisted with India’s first lunar orbiter. “This Mars mission will certainly help with that.”

Additional reporting by Jacob Aron