Almost a decade after its launch in 2013, India’s Mars Orbiter mission has run out of fuel and will be grounded. The mission, which was an Asian country’s first mission to Mars, demonstrated a different approach to planetary science by building and launching it on a much lower budget than typical Mars missions by larger space agencies such as NASA or l ‘European Space Agency.
In an update shared this week, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) praised the mission’s findings, writing that “despite being designed for six months as a technology demonstrator, the Mars Orbiter mission lived for approximately eight years in orbit. of Mars with a whole series of important scientific results. ” On Mars as well as on the solar corona, before losing contact with the Earth station, due to the long eclipse of April 2022 “.
In discussions at a national ISRO meeting, scientists announced that the mission would run out of propellant and thus could not drive the spacecraft, according to Digitartlends.
“The spacecraft has been declared unrecoverable and has reached the end of its life,” ISRO wrote. “The mission will be seen as a remarkable technical and scientific achievement in the history of planetary exploration.”
Launched for just $ 73 million, the mission is pretty cheap for a mission to Mars, even in an orbiter. It is generally cheaper to design and launch an orbiter than a rover or probe, but even budgets for an orbiter mission to Mars are usually in the hundreds of millions.
ISRO was able to launch its low-cost mission by reducing testing, simplifying design and adopting a modular approach to hardware.
According to a Forbes interview by Koppillil Radhakrishnan, the head of ISRO who oversaw the development of the mission, there were also long days of work awaited by scientists and engineers and a focus on planning to prevent costly delays.
Some of the mission’s scientific achievements include revealing information about the composition of Mars’ atmosphere, as well as learning more about the possible causes of the atmospheric escape through which Mars loses its atmosphere over time. The mission was also able to take photos of the entire face of Mars thanks to its elliptical orbit, which sometimes took it away from the planet’s surface.
However, one of the mission’s big goals, to understand more about methane in the Martian atmosphere, was overlooked because the spacecraft’s methane sensor didn’t work.
The mission was groundbreaking and there are already plans for a later mission, Mars Orbiter Mission 2, scheduled to launch in 2024.
