A year around the red planet

Nieuws | de redactie

27 augustus 2015 | Last year India reached Mars wit hits spacecraft Mangalyaan. It was celebrated as one of the cheapest missions to Mars. Now – a year after – cheers will be even greater as the result of its one year orbit around the red planet turn out to be spectacular.

The Indian satellite is almost finished with a one year orbit around Mars in which it almost without interuption kept sending images and data to the earth. Debiprasad Karnik, as spokesman of the Indian Space Research Organization, recently said that the satellite is still in good shape.

The latest results are some spectacular pictures taken by the Mars Colour Camera. They depict the Ophir Chasma, a large canyon in the Coprates quadrangle of Mars. The word ‘Chasma’ is designated specifically by the International Astronomical Union  to refer to an elongate, steepsided depression. The images were taken on the 19th of July and can be found here.

With the Mangalyaan Mars Mission, India celebrates a highly succesful space project. It feels as a homage to the former president Abdul Kalam, who passed away recently. Kalam was an aerospace engineer himself and a great champion of the Indian knowledge revolution. ScienceGuide interviewed him in 2007. “In the year the Sputnik was launched, I graduated.” You can read the full interview (in Dutch) here.