India's first Mars satellite successfully enters orbit

After a 10-month space journey, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) has arrived at Mars.

On Wednesday at 2:29 GMT, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) confirmed that the unmanned probe had successfully executed a 24 minute and 14 second engine burn to go into orbit around the Red Planet.

Due to the laws of orbital mechanics, the autonomous engine burn had to take place while the MOM probe was flying behind Mars out of telemetry contact with Earth. If the engine fired incorrectly, the probe could have been hurled back into space or burned up in the Martian atmosphere. After contact was reestablished with mission control in Bangalore, they confirmed the probe had settled into its proper elliptical orbit.

MOM was launched on November 5, 2013 from the ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Center on the island of Sriharikota on top of a PSLV-C25 rocket.

MOM’s design calls for a highly elliptical, 77-hour-orbit that will bring the probe as close as 365 km and as far away as 80,000 km from the planet.

The Mangalyaan robotic probe, one of the cheapest interplanetary missions on record, will soon start studying the Red Planet’s atmosphere. The probe has a camera and four scientific instruments. MOM will search for methane, a key sign for scientists looking for signs of life on Mars.

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