Mangalyaan (Mars Orbiter Mission)

Start with the reason for the trip. Then see what ISRO wanted to prove.

1. What is the Mars Orbiter Mission, and what else is it called?

The Mars Orbiter Mission is India’s first interplanetary mission. It is often shortened to MOM. ISRO’s own FAQ gives the other name, Mangalyaan. Both names mean the same spacecraft.

The spacecraft was a probe that circled Mars. It did not land. ISRO launched it from Sriharikota on 5 November 2013.

2. Why did India choose Mars?

ISRO says Mars gives scientists a chance to study conditions on another planet. Its release statement lists some basic Mars facts.

• A Mars day is 24 hours and 37 minutes long.
• Mars takes 687 days to go round the Sun.
• Its gravity is about one-third of Earth’s gravity.
• Its air pressure is about 1 percent of Earth’s.

3. Was the mission mainly about science?

No. ISRO says the objectives were “primarily technological”. The main goal was to show that India could build and fly a Mars spacecraft.

The technology goals were these.

• Build an orbiter that could survive the Earth-bound burns, the long cruise and the Mars orbit.
• Capture the spacecraft into Mars orbit.
• Handle deep-space communication, navigation and mission planning.
• Add on-board autonomy to handle faults without waiting for Earth.

The science goals came second. They were to study Mars’s surface features, minerals and atmosphere with Indian instruments.

The trip had three parts. First came the launch and the climb out of Earth’s pull. Then came a long cruise. Last came the capture at Mars.

4. When and how was the spacecraft launched?

PSLV-C25 lifted off on 5 November 2013 at 14:38 IST. The launch facts are below.

• Place: the First Launch Pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota.
• Flight: the 25th flight of the PSLV.
• Separation: about 44 minutes after lift-off.

After separation, the rocket’s job was over. The spacecraft’s own engine had to do the rest.

5. Which rocket carried it, and what does "XL" mean?

The rocket was the PSLV, in its extended form. That form is called PSLV-XL. The Current Science paper says “PSLV-XL, designated as PSLV-C25”.

The PSLV has four stages that alternate between solid and liquid fuel. The XL version adds six strap-on boosters. ISRO’s table lists the first stage and the strap-on motors as solid-fuel stages.

The PSLV could not send the spacecraft all the way to Mars. It only placed it in an oval orbit around Earth. The spacecraft’s own engine did the rest.

6. What was the first orbit around Earth?

The rocket put the spacecraft into an oval “parking orbit” around Earth. Its nearest point was 248 km above Earth. Its farthest point was 23,550 km.

• Inclination to the equator: 19.27 degrees.
• Time for one round of Earth: about 6.8 hours.
• Spacecraft mass at lift-off: 1,337 kg.

ISRO’s pre-launch page planned for about 250 km by 23,500 km. The achieved numbers are the 248 km and 23,550 km above.

7. How did the spacecraft climb out of Earth's pull?

This step is called orbit raising. The spacecraft fired its main engine six times. The engine is the 440 N Liquid Apogee Motor, or LAM.

• The burns ran from 7 to 16 November 2013.
• Each burn pushed the far point of the orbit higher.
• The far point rose with each burn, to a very high oval orbit.

Each burn happened at the orbit’s nearest point to Earth.

8. What is Trans-Mars Injection, and when did it happen?

Trans-Mars Injection is the burn that sends a spacecraft away from Earth toward Mars. It is shortened to TMI. ISRO fired the LAM for it in the early hours of 1 December 2013.

PIB says the spacecraft escaped Earth’s orbit after this burn. It left Earth’s sphere of influence on 4 December 2013. ISRO’s profile page puts the edge of that sphere at 918,347 km from Earth.

After that, the Sun’s pull mattered more than Earth’s. The spacecraft was now on a path around the Sun.

9. Why did the cruise take about 300 days?

ISRO chose the path that uses the least fuel. This is called a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, or a Minimum Energy Transfer Orbit. The path is roughly half an ellipse around the Sun.

Such a path works only when Earth, the Sun and Mars line up in a certain way. That match comes back about every 780 days. ISRO lists the openings as November 2013, January 2016 and May 2018.

That is why India launched in November 2013. ISRO says the cruise lasted about 300 days.

10. What happened during the cruise?

PIB gave a progress report in July 2014. By 14 July 2014 the spacecraft had covered about 531 million km of a 680 million km path. All systems were working normally.

ISRO’s illustrated book adds more points.

• The spacecraft crossed the half-way mark on 9 April 2014.
• By 15 September 2014 it had covered about 653 million km.
• On that day a radio signal took 12 minutes to reach it.

Distance made control from Earth slow. So the spacecraft carries “autonomy” features. It can spot some of its own faults and fix them.

This was the make-or-break moment. The spacecraft had to slow down at exactly the right time.

11. What happened on 24 September 2014?

The spacecraft entered an orbit around Mars on 24 September 2014. It fired its 440 N engine along with eight smaller liquid engines. The burn began at 07:17:32 IST.

• The burn lasted 1,388.67 seconds, or about 23 minutes.
• It changed the spacecraft’s speed by 1,099 metres per second.
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched from ISRO’s ISTRAC centre in Bengaluru.

The burn slowed the spacecraft. This is called Mars Orbit Insertion, or MOI.

PIB’s own explainer in 2026 misprints the date as 23 September. PIB’s press release on the day says 24 September.

12. Why was the orbit insertion so risky?

The main engine had sat idle for nearly ten months. It had to restart on the day.

ISRO took steps to protect the engine.

• The engine was sealed off with pyro valves after the Earth-bound burns.
• The valves were opened again after the cruise.
• Ground tests copied the flight conditions.

The burn was done in “blow-down” mode. The propellant was pushed out by the gas already in the tanks. The signal delay also meant the spacecraft had to manage itself.

13. What orbit did the spacecraft enter?

PIB gave the first orbit numbers on 24 September 2014.

• Nearest point (periapsis): 421.7 km.
• Farthest point (apoapsis): 76,993.6 km.
• Tilt to Mars’s equator: 150 degrees.
• Time for one round: 72 hours 51 minutes 51 seconds.

The orbit was very oval, so it was highly elliptical. That let the camera see the whole planet from far away. It could also see small areas from close up.

The orbit later changed. ISRO now describes it as about 300 km by about 71,000 km. One round takes about 73 hours. A 2016 ISRO release gave 343 km by 71,191 km.

14. Was India really the only country to succeed on its first try?

ISRO and the Prime Minister say India was the first country to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt. ISRO’s illustrated book goes further. It says India is “the only country” to achieve total success in its very first attempt.

An outside check makes the claim more careful.

• NPR, quoting the Associated Press in 2013, noted that no country had yet reached Mars on its first try.
• ESA’s Mars Express was Europe’s first Mars mission. It entered orbit on 25 December 2003. Its lander, Beagle 2, was lost.

So the safe wording is that India was the first Asian country to reach Mars orbit, and did so on its first attempt. PIB’s 2026 explainer uses the phrase “first Asian nation”. The word “only” is ISRO’s own phrase, not a settled fact. See Source disagreements.

15. Who reached Mars before India?

PIB said that ISRO became “the fourth space agency” to send a spacecraft to Mars orbit. India was not the second country after the USA. The three before it were the United States, the Soviet Union and the European Space Agency.

• NASA’s Mariner 9 was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. It reached Mars in November 1971.
• NASA says Mariner 9 beat the Soviet Mars 2 to the planet.
• ESA’s Mars Express entered orbit on 25 December 2003.

Two more came after India. Space.com reported that the UAE became the fifth entity and China the sixth, in February 2021.

16. How big was the spacecraft?

The spacecraft weighed 1,337 kg at lift-off. About 852 kg of that was propellant. The dry mass was about 482.5 kg. The scientific payloads weighed only about 13 to 15 kg together.

• Main engine: one 440 N Liquid Apogee Motor.
• Small thrusters: eight, of 22 N each.
• Propellants: MMH and N2O4, in titanium tanks of 390 litres each.

17. How did it get power and talk to Earth?

Three solar panels made about 840 W of power in Mars orbit. A 36 Ah lithium-ion battery powered the spacecraft during burns and eclipses. Sunlight at Mars is much weaker than at Earth.

For radio links, the spacecraft used a 2.2 m high-gain antenna. On the ground, ISRO used a 32 m station of the Indian Deep Space Network.

The round-trip radio time to Mars averages about 28.4 minutes. So the spacecraft had to act on its own during blackouts. Examples are when Mars hid it, or when the Sun blocked the signal.

18. How much did the mission cost?

ISRO gives the cost as Rupees 450 crore. Its illustrated book says this is about 80 million US dollars. Outside reports used different dollar numbers.

• NPR (2013): a budget of 73 million dollars.
• Space.com: 74 million dollars.
• NASA’s MAVEN: about 671 million dollars.

ISRO calls MOM the most economical interplanetary mission in the world. NPR gave several reasons for the low cost. Engineers in India cost less, and the instruments were fairly simple.

The dollar figure depends on the exchange rate and the source. For exams, the rupee figure is the safest. See Source disagreements.

19. What are the five payloads?

The spacecraft carried five scientific instruments. ISRO lists them by name and short form.

• Mars Colour Camera (MCC).
• Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS).
• Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM).
• Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA).
• Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP).

Three were built at the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad. They are the camera, the methane sensor and the thermal imager. MENCA came from the Space Physics Laboratory at VSSC, Thiruvananthapuram. LAP came from LEOS, Bengaluru.

20. What was each payload meant to do?

Two instruments study the surface. Two study the atmosphere. One studies the particles near Mars.

• MCC: takes colour pictures to map landforms, dust storms and dust devils.
• TIS: measures heat from the surface in the 7 to 13 micron range. It maps temperature and minerals.
• MSM: looks for methane at the level of a few parts per billion. Methane can come from geology or from life.
• LAP: measures deuterium and hydrogen in the upper air. This shows how water was lost.
• MENCA: a mass spectrometer that studies neutral gases in the outer air, called the exosphere.

21. What did the camera and imaging payloads show?

ISRO’s 2022 summary lists the results.

• The camera took a full-disc image of Mars. The oval orbit made this possible.
• It photographed the far side of Deimos, a moon of Mars, for the first time.
• It tracked changes in the polar ice caps.
• It showed lee-wave clouds above the southern wall of Valles Marineris.
• It helped study dust storms and the dust layer.

ISRO also published a Mars Atlas from the camera’s images. A peer-reviewed paper in Planetary and Space Science describes the Deimos result as “a rarity among contemporary Mars orbiters”.

22. What did the atmosphere instruments find?

The atmosphere results are more modest. ISRO’s 2022 summary lists these.

• MENCA measured the make-up of gases in the Mars exosphere.
• It found where the air shifts from carbon-dioxide rich to atomic-oxygen rich on the evening side.
• It found “suprathermal” argon-40 atoms. This hints at one way Mars lost its air.

The methane result was a disappointment. The Planetary Society reported in 2016 that the methane sensor had not found any methane. It added that the sensor may simply be too weak to sense small amounts. So the result is not proof that Mars has no methane.

23. How much data came out of the mission, and who used it?

ISRO releases the data through the Indian Space Science Data Centre. The 2022 meeting gave these numbers.

• More than 7,200 registered users.
• About 27,000 downloads of science data.
• About 400 users from 50 other countries.

The same release says the mission helped train researchers.

24. How long was the mission meant to last, and how long did it work?

ISRO says the designed life was six months. That period ended on 23 March 2015. The mission kept working long after that.

• It completed 7 years in orbit on 24 September 2021.
• ISRO’s 2022 summary says it lived about eight years in Mars orbit.
• It survived a 35-day solar conjunction in 2015 on its own.

Space.com says ISRO designed it to last six to 10 months. ISRO’s own pages say six months. Use the ISRO number.

25. How and why did the mission end?

ISRO lost contact with the spacecraft after a long eclipse in April 2022. ISRO said the propellant must have run out.

Without fuel, the spacecraft could not point its panels at the Sun. That meant it could not make power for long. ISRO declared it non-recoverable and at its end-of-life.

ISRO announced this on 3 October 2022. The announcement followed a national meeting on 27 September 2022. ISRO called the mission a remarkable technological and scientific feat.

26. How does it compare with other Mars missions?

Only a few facts here are backed by the sources.

• Mariner 9 (NASA, 1971) was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.
• Mars Express (ESA) entered orbit on 25 December 2003.
• NASA’s MAVEN entered Mars orbit at 10:24 pm EDT on 21 September 2014. That is 22 September in UTC, about two days before MOM.
• MAVEN was the first spacecraft dedicated to the upper atmosphere of Mars.

MOM was a technology demonstration with five small instruments. NPR put MAVEN’s cost at about 671 million dollars against India’s 73 million.

27. Is there a Mangalyaan-2?

Plans have been reported, but ISRO has not confirmed the details. Space.com reported in 2024 that ISRO officials described a Mars Orbiter Mission-2. The reports mention a lander-type mission with a rover and a helicopter. Space.com itself says ISRO had made no official announcements.

PIB’s 2026 explainer lists “Mars Orbiter Mission” among upcoming scientific missions. It gives no date or design. Treat Mangalyaan-2 as a planned mission, with no launch date to learn.

28. What are the exam traps?

Use this checklist.

• Mangalyaan and the Mars Orbiter Mission are the same mission.
• India was the fourth space agency to reach Mars orbit. It was not the second.
• The three before India were NASA, the Soviet Union and ESA.
• India was the first Asian country to reach Mars orbit.
• It was an orbiter. It did not land.
• Launch: 5 November 2013, PSLV-C25 (PSLV-XL), Sriharikota.
• Mars Orbit Insertion: 24 September 2014.
• Cost: about Rupees 450 crore. Quote the rupee figure.
• Designed life: six months. ISRO says actual life was about eight years.
• Five payloads: MCC, TIS, MSM, LAP and MENCA.
• The methane sensor did not report a methane find.
• The “first attempt” claim is India’s own wording. Say “first Asian country, and on its first attempt”.