Google doodle celebrates Mangalyaan’s one month in Mars’ orbit

Google is celebrating Mangalyaan aka India’s Mars Orbiter’s one month in the Mars orbit with a simple doodle on its search page. The Indian Mars Orbiter entered the Mars orbit on 24 September, making India the first nation in the world to successfully launch a Mars mission in its maiden attempt.

Google doodles are usually dedicated to anniversaries or mark birthdays luminaries from various fields, this doodle is an extremely rare one. However this is not a global doodle and has been specially created for India.

With Mangalyaan’s launch, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) became the fourth international space agency after National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US, Russian Federal Space Agency (RFSA) and European Space Agency to undertake a mission to Mars.

It was also one of the cheapest Mars missions to have been undertaken so far as it cost only $74 million. Mangalyaan carried with it five scientific instruments which will be used to will study the Martian surface and its mineral composition and scan its atmosphere for methane gas.

Mangalyaan has five instruments aboard: a camera, two spectrometers, a radiometer and a photometer. It aims to understand the process by which water was lost on Mars, measure methane levels in the Martian atmosphere, map the surface, composition and mineralogy of Mars and take images of the Martian surface.

None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist. Some of the data will complement research expected to be conducted by Maven.

Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) was launched 5 November, 2013, on board a polar rocket from the country’s only spaceport at Sriharikota off the Bay of Bengal, about 80 km northeast of Chennai.

Source: First Post