Image of the entire disk of Mars obtained by the Mangalyaan probe – ISRO
Oct. 3 () –
The Mangalyaan mission, India’s first space probe to orbit Mars, has ended after eight scientific investigations, when it was planned for only six months.
At a scientific meeting organized on September 27 by ISRO –India’s space agency– on the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the spacecraft’s orbital insertion on the ‘red planet’, it was decided that the propellant must have been exhausted and it is no longer possible to generate energy in a sustained manner. Therefore, it was declared that “The spacecraft is not recoverable and has reached the end of its useful life.”
The communication of the also called MOM mission (Mars Orbiter Mission) with the ground station has been interrupted for months, as a result of a long eclipse in April 2022, according to the statement released this October 3 by ISRO.
Mangalyaan has provided an understanding of the composition of various gases in the Martian exosphere, quantifying the altitude where the Martian atmosphere transitions from the CO2-rich regime to the atomic-oxygen-rich regime during the local night. The mission is also credited with discovering “suprathermal” argon-40 atoms in the Martian exosphere, which gave some clue as to one of the potential mechanisms for escape from the Martian atmosphere.
On the other hand, the observation of a large Martian dust storm from the spacecraft allowed us to understand the dynamics of dust on the planet, as well as a possible escape mechanism from the Martian atmosphere. Atmospheric optical depth was estimated with the help of the probe’s observations and studies reported the presence of lee wave clouds over the southern wall of Valles Marineris.
The MOM probe photographed, for the first time, the hidden face of Deimos, one of the natural satellites of Mars. The mission was able to capture the full image of the disk of Mars due to its elliptical orbit.; it also generated an atlas of Mars with the help of the mission’s onboard color camera.
The mission also captured the temporal variation of the Martian polar ice caps; he also measured the apparent Martian albedo which indicated the reflective power of the Martian surface. The mission also provided the opportunity to classify extraterrestrial landslides using machine learning models.
