First pictures from Red Planet arrive, Mangalyaan 'doing well'

They are here! Mangalyaan's first offering to India is out in the open. 

Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) released on Thursday the first image of Mars clicked by the indigenous Mangalyaan, which took India to soaring heights a day ago by slipping into the Red Planet's orbit on the country's maiden attempt.

Isro said the photograph — named 'First Light' — it posted on its Facebook page and Twitter account was taken from "a height of 7300 km; with 376 m spatial resolution".

The image showed an orange surface with dark cavities. “The view is nice up here,” Isro said on Twitter.

Photo courtesy: Isro's Facebook page

"The Mars Colour Camera (MCC) onboard started working soon after the orbiter stabilised in the elliptical orbit of Mars and has taken a dozen quality pictures of its surface and its surroundings," Isro's scientific secretary V Koteshwara Rao said.

An Isro team led by agency chief K Radhakrishnan met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi on Thursday with hard copies of all the pictures taken by the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) probe.

Speculation is rife that Isro might release them later in the day.

The photographs bear a testimony to the fact that MOM, which helped India join an elite club of successful Mars explorers, is in 'good health' and performing its duties well.

The spacecraft, according to Isro scientists, started sending its first high-quality images of the Red Planet late on Wednesday.

"Images are clicked. Data is downloaded. Process is going on," a top Isro official had told HT, confirming all is well.

The snaps were expected to arrive in the afternoon on the momentous day, but there was no news about them till evening, causing some concerns.

India had joined on Wednesday an exclusive global club of deep space explorers when Mangalyaan successfully entered the orbit around Mars after a 10-month journey on a relatively shoe-string budget.

The probe costs just Rs. 450 core and is about a tenth of the amount US space agency Nasa spent on sending the Maven spacecraft to Mars and about three-quarters the amount to make the Oscar-winning movie Gravity about astronauts stranded in space.

India's probe has been placed in an elliptical orbit around Mars and it will be closest to the planet at 377 km and farthest at 80,000 km.

The 1,350-kilogram orbiter will now circle the planet for at least six months, with solar-powered instruments gathering scientific data that may shed light on Martian weather systems as well as what happened to the water that is believed to have existed once on Mars.

It will also search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on earth that could come from geological processes. None of the instruments will send back enough information to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form and what conditions might make life possible.

Source:-http://www.hindustantimes.com