In Line With NASA's InSight, India's Mars Orbiting Mission Will Also Stop Operating

The Mars India orbiter (MOM) mission will reportedly stop operating in the near future, (photo: Doc. ISRO)

JAKARTA - The Mars India (MOM) orbiter mission will reportedly stop operating in the near future, after nearly a decade of exploring the Red Planet.

Launched in 2013, MOM took a different approach to Mars. He was also built with a much smaller budget than the Mars mission carried out by NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA), which was 73 million US dollars or equivalent to IDR 1.1 trillion.

"Despite being designed for a six-month life span as a tech demonstrator, the Mars Orbiting Mission has lived for about eight years in Mars orbit with all significant scientific results on Mars as well as on the Sun's corona, before losing communication with the earth station, as a result of a lengthy eclipse in April 2022," the India Space Research Organization (ISRO) wrote in a statement.

ISRO said MOM will soon run out of fuel boosters or propellants, so the country can no longer rely on this spacecraft for research on Mars.

Aerospace planes cannot be restored, and (already) reach the end of its life. This mission will always be considered an extraordinary technological and scientific achievement in the history of planetary exploration," ISRO said.

Although it is fairly cheap for the class of Mars orbiters, some of the achievements of MOM are quite extraordinary, it includes revealing information about the composition of the Martian atmosphere, as well as studying further about the potential causes of atmospheric escape where Mars lost its atmosphere over time.

The mission was also able to take pictures of the entire face of Mars because of its elliptical orbit, sometimes taking it away from the planet's surface.

One of the mission's big goals is to understand more about methane in the Martian atmosphere, unfortunately this mission was missed because the methane sensor in the spacecraft was malfunctioning.

India did not just give up, MOM will soon stop operating, but the continued mission of Mars Orbiter Mission 2 has been prepared, and is planned to launch in 2024.