Next month, India’s mission to Mars is expected to complete a year in orbit around the red planet and its photo album so far is out of this world.
The spacecraft, named Mangalyaan, Hindi for Mars craft, has already completed more than 100 orbits since it arrived at the planet on Sept. 24, 2014.
At a cost of $74 million, the Indian Space Research Organization’s mission to Mars was the cheapest of recent missions to Mars mounted by other space agencies.
The satellite is healthy and continues to “glean data,” Debiprasad Karnik, a spokesman for ISRO, said Friday.
Apart from a few days in June when it lost touch with Earth after moving behind the Sun in a phenomenon called “solar conjuncture,” Mangalyaan has remained in contact and been sending photographs taken by the Mars Color Camera back to scientists in India.
The photo above, taken in July, is of the Ophir Chasma, part of what the National Aeronautics and Space Administration describes as the largest canyon system in the solar system, known as the Valles Marineris.
NASA calls the geographical feature the Grand Canyon of Mars. At a length of more than 1,800 miles, it is almost 3.5 times the length of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The walls of the chasma, that is described by the International Astronomical Union as “an elongate steepsided depression,” are multi-layered, the floor too contains large deposits of layered materials.
via Spectacular Images of Mars From India’s Most-Ambitious Space Mission – India Real Time – WSJ.
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