BANGALORE: India’s spacecraft has beamed back its first photos of Mars, showing its crater-marked surface, as the country glowed with pride Thursday after winning Asia’s race to the Red Planet.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) uploaded one of the photos to its Facebook page, showing an orange surface with dark holes, taken from a height of 7,300 kilometres (4,536 miles).
ISRO also posted the photo on Twitter, with the caption “The view is nice up here”.
The organisation’s senior scientist V. Koteswara Rao said the spacecraft, called the Mars Orbiter Mission, has taken a dozen photos and that everything was working well.
“The Mars colour camera on board started working soon after Orbiter stabilised in the elliptical orbit of Mars and has taken a dozen quality pictures of its surface and its surroundings,” Rao told AFP.
“The camera will also take images of the Red Planet’s two moons and beam them to our deep space network centre,” he added, referring to the base near the southern city of Bangalore.
2011 despite the Asian superpower pouring billions of dollars into its programme.
At just $74 million, India’s mission cost less than the estimated $100 million budget of the sci-fi blockbuster “Gravity”.
It also represents just a fraction of the cost of NASA’s $671 million MAVEN spacecraft, which successfully began orbiting the fourth planet from the sun on Sunday.
India now joins an elite club of the United States, Russia and Europe who can boast of reaching Mars. More than half of all missions to the planet have ended in failure.
No single nation had previously succeeded on its first go, although the European Space Agency, which represents a consortium of countries, pulled off the feat at its first attempt.
Scientists presented the Mars photos on Thursday to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was on hand in the command centre to witness the achievement.
