Mars on the First Try

Early on the morning of 24 September 2014, in a control room in Bengaluru, a team of Indian scientists sat very still and watched their screens.

More than 200 million kilometres away, their spacecraft was approaching Mars. Its main engine, which had been silent for most of a ten-month journey, was about to fire. If it fired for the right length of time, the spacecraft would slow down enough to be caught by Mars's gravity and swing into orbit around the planet. If anything went wrong, it would fly past Mars and be lost in space forever.

There was nothing anyone on Earth could do to help. Radio signals took more than twelve minutes to travel between Mars and Earth. By the time the team saw what was happening, it would already have happened.

Why Mars was so hard

Mars is famously difficult to reach. Of all the missions that different countries had sent there, more than half had failed. No country had ever succeeded on its very first attempt.

The Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, had begun with sounding rockets from a fishing village in Kerala in 1963. By 2008 it had sent a spacecraft to orbit the Moon. In August 2012, the government announced that India would try for Mars.

The team had very little time. To make the journey with the least fuel, a spacecraft must leave when Earth and Mars are lined up just right, and that happens only about once every 26 months. The next chance was in November 2013. The spacecraft had to be designed, built and tested in about fifteen months.

It was given a simple name. Mangal is the Hindi word for Mars, and yaan means a craft or vehicle. People called it Mangalyaan.

A clever way to get there

India's most reliable rocket, the PSLV, was not powerful enough to throw a spacecraft straight towards Mars. So the engineers found another way.

On 5 November 2013, the rocket lifted off from Sriharikota, on the coast of Andhra Pradesh, and placed the spacecraft in a long oval orbit around Earth. Over the next few weeks, the spacecraft fired its own engine again and again, each time near the closest point to Earth. With each firing, the oval stretched further out into space, like a stone being whirled faster and faster on a string.

On 1 December 2013, it fired one last time and broke free. It was on its way to Mars.

The whole mission cost about 450 crore rupees, roughly 74 million dollars. Many people pointed out that this was less than the cost of making some Hollywood films about space. The team kept costs low by reusing designs they already trusted, keeping the spacecraft small, and doing much of the work in parallel instead of one step after another.

The longest twelve minutes

For ten months, the spacecraft coasted through space. The main engine sat unused. Would it still work after so long in the cold?

Two days before arrival, on 22 September 2014, the team tested it with a short burst of just a few seconds. It worked. The tension in the control room eased a little.

On the morning of 24 September, the spacecraft turned itself around and, at exactly the planned moment, fired its engine to slow down. For part of the burn, it passed behind Mars, out of contact with Earth. The team could only wait.

Then the signals came through. The engine had fired for the full time. Mangalyaan was in orbit around Mars.

The room erupted in cheers. Scientists hugged each other. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had come to watch, congratulated the team. Pictures of the celebration, including many women scientists of the team in bright saris, were seen around the world.

What it meant

India had become the first Asian country to reach Mars orbit, and the first country in the world to do it on its very first try. Only the space agencies of the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe had reached Mars before.

The spacecraft carried five small science instruments. Its colour camera sent back pictures of the whole planet, its giant volcanoes, its dust storms and its small moons. The mission had been planned to last six months. It kept working for almost eight years, until contact was finally lost in 2022.

Behind the mission stood many people: the ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan, the programme director M. Annadurai, the project director S. Arunan, and hundreds of engineers and scientists, many of them young and many of them women. Some of them, such as Ritu Karidhal and Nandini Harinath, became well known in India for their part in it.

In 2016, a picture of Mangalyaan was printed on India's new 2,000-rupee note. In classrooms across the country, children who had never thought about space began to ask how they too could become scientists. For a country that had once carried rocket parts on bicycles, it was a long way to have come.

Want to read more?

Reaching for the Stars by Pallava Bagla and Subhadra Menon tells the story of the mission as it happened. K. Radhakrishnan's memoir My Odyssey gives the view from the head of ISRO at the time. ISRO's own website has the mission's pictures of Mars.