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ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

ISRO

Without fanfare, an Indian spacecraft just completed its fifth year in orbit around Mars last week. As the spacecraft nears the end of its design lifetime, this is a moment that seems worth a little more recognition.

When it launched the Mars Orbiter Mission in November, 2013, India had never attempted an interplanetary flight before. And Mars is really treacherous. About 50% of spacecraft sent to Mars fail either upon launch, attempting to enter orbit, or landing on the surface. India made it on the country's first try, with a budget significantly less than $100 million. The spacecraft remains in good working order, with fuel for at least another year of operations.

While the orbiter didn't make any huge new scientific discoveries—it had neither the very best cameras nor instruments among its modest 15kg of payload—it carried far more weight symbolically as it expanded the community of Mars exploration beyond the traditional space-faring nations. Before the Mars Orbiter Mission reached Mars, only the United States, Soviet Union, and European Space Agency had successfully sent robotic missions to Mars.

"It benefits everybody for more countries to be involved in planetary exploration," said Ali Bramson, a planetary scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona. "Space exploration is hard. So, India's success as a space-faring nation, especially as one that can put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, increases the ability for collaboration between countries, both scientifically and from an engineering and technology development perspective."

The success of the Mars Orbiter Mission is all the more notable given recent failures to both reach Mars and land on the Moon. In 2016, the European Space Agency successfully inserted its Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft into orbit around Mars, but its Schiaparelli lander was lost after the premature release of its parachute. And three of the last six missions that attempted to reach lunar orbit or the Moon's surface, between 2018 and 2019, failed. This included, most recently, India's Vikram lander in July.

"The Indian space agency should be very proud of this success," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the chief of NASA's science exploration program. "With this mission, India beat the odds and has become one of very few countries that have successfully achieved this. This mission also continues to do worthwhile science."

Much like the Apollo program did for the United States during the 1960s, the Mars Orbiter Mission has also helped inspire Indians about science and technology.

"India's space program is very important to that nation, for similar reasons that the US space program is important to Americans—it is aspirational, it stretches the best of its citizens, it demands humans to stretch their imagination and their maker-potential and to translate big ideas to reality," said Renu Malhotra, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona. "I've also been impressed that India's space program has been careful to define smart science goals for each mission."

For all of this, however, at its core the Mars Orbiter Mission served essentially as a technology demonstrator for future Indian missions to the Red Planet. India has been working on a followup mission with a larger spacecraft, but it has yet to formally announce any plans.

Listing image by ISRO