The Mangalyaan mission, which was meant to last six months, completed five years of orbiting Mars on September 24, 2019.
In the past five years, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), India’s first interplanetary endeavour, helped India’s space agency prepare a Martian Atlas based on the images provided by the orbiter.
The launch vehicle, spacecraft and ground segment was built at a cost ₹450 crore. But the mission is likely to continue its mission for some more time.
In the past years, the Mars orbiter has sent thousands of pictures of the planet and this has helped ISRO prepare a Martian Atlas. The orbiter is the only Martian artificial satellite that has captured the full disc of Mars in one view frame. It has also captured Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, from a short distance. The data from the mission has helped produced 23 publications in peer-reviewed journals.
