What am I looking at?
Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), unofficially known as Mangalyaan (Sanskrit: Maṅgala 'Mars', Yāna 'Craft, Vehicle'), is a space probe orbiting Mars since 24 September 2014.
The quick answer
Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), unofficially known as Mangalyaan (Sanskrit: Maṅgala 'Mars', Yāna 'Craft, Vehicle'), is a space probe orbiting Mars since 24 September 2014. It was launched on 5 November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was India's first interplanetary mission and it made ISRO the fourth space agency to achieve Mars orbit, after Soviet space program, NASA, and the European Space Agency. It made India the first Asian nation to reach Martian orbit. It also made ISRO the first national space agency in the world to do so with an indigenously developed propulsion system and the second national space agency to succeed on its maiden attempt, after the European Space Agency accomplished this in 2003 using a Roscosmos Soyuz/Fregat rocket.
How it came to be
The Mars Orbiter Mission probe lifted off from the First Launch Pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (Sriharikota Range SHAR), Andhra Pradesh, using a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket C25 at 09:08 (UTC) on 5 November 2013. The launch window was approximately 20 days long and started on 28 October 2013. The MOM probe spent about a month in Earth orbit, where it made a series of seven apogee-raising orbital maneuver before trans-Mars injection on 30 November 2013 (UTC). After a 298-day transit to Mars, it was put into Mars orbit on 24 September 2014.
The detail most people miss
The mission was a technology demonstrator project to develop the technologies for designing, planning, management, and operations of an interplanetary mission. It carried five scientific instruments. The spacecraft was monitored from the Spacecraft Control Centre at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bengaluru with support from the Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) antennae at Bengaluru, Karnataka.
Why it still matters
On 2 October 2022, it was reported that the orbiter had irrecoverably lost communications with Earth after entering a seven-hour eclipse period in April 2022 that it was not designed to survive. The following day, ISRO released a statement that all attempts to revive MOM had failed and officially declared it dead. The loss of fuel preventing the attitude adjustment of the spacecraft required to sustain battery power to the probe's instruments had been discussed at an ISRO conference on September 27 commemorating the spacecraft's eight-year anniversary of insertion into Mars orbit.
