India Puts Spacecraft Into Orbit Around Mars

India joined an elite club when it successfully guided its Mars Orbiter Mission, affectionately called MOM, into orbit around Mars this week, reports The Huffington Post.

Only the U.S., former Soviet Union and the European Space Agency have been previously able to do that.

MOM had traveled roughly 414 million miles for more than 300 days.

"Our scientists have achieved this in the first attempt," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said from the command center. "We have dared to reach out into the unknown and have achieved near impossible."

MOM was developed with Indian technology for $75 million. NASA's much larger Maven mission, whose satellite also went into orbit around Mars this week, cost nearly 10 times as much.

MOM will circle the planet for six months, with solar-powered instruments gathering scientific data about Martian weather and what happened to the water that is thought to have existed once on Mars.

It also will search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth, that could also come from geological processes. Experts hope data gathered will help them better understand how planets form and what conditions might make life possible.

India's success shows the world that "they are now a force of capability that can be taken very seriously," said Roger Franzen, the technical program manager at the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. "India has an extremely well-developed space industry that manufactures everything from the components to the spacecraft to the instrumentation to the launch vessels."

India's success will also inspire a new generation of scientists. According to The Huffington Post, 12-year-old Mansha Khanna, who was visiting the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi for Mars-themed learning activities, said "this mission's success gave her something to dream about - becoming a scientist or an astronaut."

"Even though India wrestles with many problems from poverty to hunger, that shouldn't stop the country from forging ahead in science and space," said B.N. Raghunandan, of the Indian Institute of Science. "I don't think we can afford to lag behind. We can't sacrifice frontier research for the sake of solving old-world problems," he said. "These technological advances have their own spinoffs and benefits."

"The focus for the space agency, which operates on an annual budget of $1.1 billion, will remain on developing technologies for commercial and navigational satellite applications," said K. Radhakrishnan, the agency's chief. "Those services could bring in significant revenues from companies or governments seeking to place their own satellites or research equipment in space."