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Interesting facts about India’s Mars Mission

Copyright ISRO
Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) mission to Mars

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has become one of the select few space research bodies to have successfully put its Mars Orbiter Mission (M.O.M.) into orbit of the red planet.

  1. This mission, dubbed Mangalyaan (“Mars Craft” in Sanskrit) puts India in the same league as the United States, Europe and Russia as having put a probe into the orbit of Mars.
  2. At a cost of just $74 million, the Mangalyann mission cost about 11% of NASA’s Maven mission, which came in at $670 million. It even cost less than the Hollywood movie Gravity ($100 million).
  3. Covering a distance of approximately 780 million kilometers, this journey to from Earth to Mars cost India about $0.094 per kilometer – cheaper than cabs in most places on Earth.
  4. The ongoing success rate for missions to Mars runs around 40%, with ISRO now being 1 for 1.
  5. The 1,350 kilogram payload of the Mars orbiter was launched from Earth by ISRO’s the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).
  6. The Mars Orbiter Mission will focus its research on the following:

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Tethys, Hyperion and Prometheus

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Three of Saturn's moons captured by Cassini
Three of Saturn’s moons (Tethys, Hyperion and Prometheus) captured by Cassini

A rare feat from the Cassini spacecraft as it captured three of Saturn’s moons (and its mystical rings) in this one frame. The largest of the visible moons in this picture is Tethys whose muti-terrain surface can be barely made out at this resolution.  To the left of Tethys is the smaller and distant moon Hyperion. It has a surface full of closely packed and deeply etched pits and is an irregularly shaped moon of Saturn. Lastly we can barely see the tiny moon Prometheus (only 86 kilometers across) as it lies at Saturn’s F ring. This visible light picture was taken by Cassini’s narrow-angle camera while the spacecraft was around 1.9 million kilometers from Tethys.

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Bonanza King drilling site on Mars

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Bonanza King NASA
Bonanza King drilling site on Mars

Curiosity Mars rover’s mast camera photographed a section of the pale rock outcrop that includes the “Bonanza King” target chosen for evaluation as the mission’s fourth rock-drilling site. This area is location in the northeastern end of “Hidden Valley” on Mars. The flat tile like rocks could contain mineral veins and other unknown materials.

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Super pit gold mine near Kalgoorlie

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Super Pit - NASA
NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite captured the “Super Pit” gold mine while making a pass over Kalgoorlie in Western Australia

Gold is a metal that has several unique properties and has long held a special place in human society. Whether its origins lie in  supernova nucleosynthesis or the collision of neutron stars, gold has been associated with value due to its rarity, malleability, resistance to corrosion, pleasing colour and specialized industrial applications. Gold’s symbol is Au and its atomic number is 79.

The Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 took this picture of the “Super Pit” gold mine near the town of Kalgoorlie which lies in the semi-arid region that is Western Australia. This open pit gold mine is a joint venture between Barrick Gold and Newmont mining. It produces approximately 850,000 ounces (28 tonnes) of gold per year.

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Blue Pulsar

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Pulsar - NASA
The blue dot is pulsar PSR J1640-4631 from the inner Milky Way galaxy

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) was able to discover this pulsar (PSR J1640-4631) by picking up the rotating beam of X-rays that were originating from its blue center. This pulsar lies in our inner Milky Way galaxy about 42,000 light-years away and its X-rays intersect Earth every 0.2 seconds. While the blue dot in this image marks the spot of this high energy pulsar (3 to 79 kiloelectron volts), the pink dots in this picture show low-energy X-rays (0.5 to 10 kiloeletron volts) detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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