India's Mars Orbiter Mission Reached Orbit on Its First Try for ₹450 Crore and Worked More Than Seven Years on a Six-Month Plan

India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, known as Mangalyaan, fired its main engine for about 24 minutes on the morning of 24 September 2014 and settled into orbit around Mars. ISRO’s archive statement says India became the first country to do that on its first attempt. The Indian Space Research Organisation puts the cost at ₹450 crore and the designed life at six months.

The spacecraft was still working in September 2021, seven years after arrival. ISRO’s update of 3 October 2022 declared it non-recoverable.

Six burns to leave Earth

ISRO calls Mangalyaan its first interplanetary mission, after Chandrayaan-1 went to the Moon. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C25, lifted off from Sriharikota at 2:38 pm on 5 November 2013. It left the spacecraft in an elliptical Earth orbit, 248.4 km at its closest point and 23,550 km at its farthest, tilted 19.27 degrees to the equator, according to ISRO’s long-term archive statement. That rocket could not send the spacecraft to Mars directly. The orbiter’s own 440 newton liquid engine had to raise the high point of the orbit in steps.

Six orbit-raising manoeuvres followed, by ISRO’s count. The first three, on 7, 8 and 9 November 2013, lifted the high point to 28,852 km, 40,186 km and 71,636 km, AmericaSpace reports.

The fourth burn that fell short

Early on 11 November, the fourth burn delivered about 35 metres per second of extra speed against a planned 130, leaving the high point at 78,276 km instead of beyond 100,000 km (AmericaSpace). Nature reported ISRO’s explanation, that energising the primary and redundant solenoid coils together had stopped the flow to the liquid engine.

On 12 November a supplementary burn of 303.8 seconds raised the high point to 118,642 km. The last Earth-orbit burn, on 16 November, ran 243.5 seconds and took it to 192,874 km, Universe Today reported.

One long burn to leave, then a wait

Trans-Mars injection began at 12:49 am IST on 1 December 2013. The 440 newton engine ran for 1,328.89 seconds and added 647.96 metres per second, AmericaSpace reported from ISRO’s bulletin. According to ISRO’s archive statement, the spacecraft was then on a path around the Sun 680 million km long, and the transit to Mars took 300 days.

The main engine then sat idle. It had last fired on 1 December 2013, Universe Today says. On 22 September 2014 at 2:30 pm IST, ISRO fired it for 3.968 seconds, changing the spacecraft’s speed by 2.18 metres per second. The test doubled as the final trajectory correction, and ISRO said it confirmed the engine was ready for the orbit-insertion burn.

The 24-minute burn

Mars blocked the radio link for part of the manoeuvre, and signals from Mars took about 12.5 minutes to reach Earth, so the spacecraft ran the burn on its own. Alongside the 440 newton engine, eight 22 newton thrusters fired. AmericaSpace gives ignition at 7:17:32 am IST and shutdown at 7:41:46 am IST, with the burn cutting the spacecraft’s speed by 1,099 metres per second and using about 249.5 kg of propellant.

Accounts of the length differ slightly. ISRO’s figure, as AmericaSpace reports it, is 1,388.67 seconds of firing, and the press reports say about 24 minutes. The sources do not explain the gap of roughly a minute.

The resulting orbit had a closest point of 421.7 km, a farthest point of 76,993.6 km, a 150 degree tilt to Mars’s equator and a period of 72 hours 51 minutes 51 seconds. Prime Minister Narendra Modi watched from ISTRAC, ISRO’s tracking centre in Bengaluru, and said “History has been created today”, Spaceflight Now reported. He also said more than half of all Mars missions have failed, per Universe Today. ISRO became the fourth space agency to put a spacecraft into Mars orbit, after the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Space Agency.

Five instruments, about 14 kg

Five instruments rode on board, with a combined mass of about 14 kg, ISRO’s archive statement says. The Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad built three of them: the Mars Colour Camera, the Methane Sensor for Mars and the Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer, which measures surface temperature by day and night. The Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA), a mass spectrometer that identifies the gas particles in Mars’s thin outer atmosphere, came from the Space Physics Laboratory at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. The Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP), which was built to measure the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the upper atmosphere, came from the Laboratory for Electro-Optical Systems in Bengaluru.

Most of the visible output comes from the camera. ISRO reports more than 1,100 images and a Mars atlas, and more than 35 peer-reviewed papers from the mission as a whole. ISRO’s 2022 update says the elliptical orbit let it capture a full-disc image of Mars and that it photographed the far side of Deimos, one of Mars’s two small moons, for the first time. The 2016 archive statement adds that imaging of Phobos and Deimos revealed new details of both.

ISRO’s list of major science results includes five papers:

• enhanced escape of Martian atmosphere during a global dust storm (Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 2020);
• suprathermal “hot” argon in the exosphere (Geophysical Research Letters, 2017);
• oxygen outnumbering carbon dioxide at about 270 km altitude in perihelion evening hours (Geophysical Research Letters, 2016);
• lee-wave clouds above the southern wall of Valles Marineris (Icarus, 2015);
• solar corona dynamics studied through MOM’s radio signals (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2022).

The 2016 statement also reports that camera data helped study how carbon dioxide and water ice at the north pole change as Mars enters northern summer, and that the mean height of a dust layer over high ground and Valles Marineris was estimated at about 1.5 km. About 7,200 users had registered to download the mission’s data by 2022, with roughly 27,000 science-data downloads.

What it cost, and how others counted

ISRO’s mission page gives ₹450 crore. Universe Today put the probe at $73 million. Modi said the cost was about a tenth of NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, which reached Mars two days earlier and which Spaceflight Now priced at $671 million. The sources do not say what each of those figures includes, so the ratio is the prime minister’s comparison, not an audited one. The wider budget picture is in our piece on ISRO’s frugal record.

Six months became seven years

Six months was the design target on ISRO’s own pages, and its 2022 update describes the mission as a technology demonstrator. It reports the orbiter completed seven years on 24 September 2021. In the 2015 solar conjunction, when the Sun lay between Mars and Earth from 27 May to 1 July, the spacecraft ran in full autonomy for 35 days with no contact.

The end came with a long eclipse. In its 3 October 2022 update, written after a national meet on 27 September, ISRO says contact with the ground station was lost after a long eclipse in April 2022. It says the propellant must have been exhausted, so the spacecraft could not hold the attitude needed to generate power, and declares it non-recoverable and at end of life.

Officials who spoke to PTI, without being named, gave more detail. They said the battery was designed for eclipses of about one hour 40 minutes, and that back-to-back eclipses, one of them seven and a half hours long, drained it. The same officials said ISRO had spent fuel earlier to move the orbit and avoid eclipses. ISRO’s page does not repeat those figures, and the exact date of the last contact is not given in the sources we could open.

Mangalyaan-2

A second Mars orbiter was on the table as early as 2016, when ISRO asked scientists for experiment proposals, The Week reported. In October 2025, Nilesh M Desai, director of the Space Applications Centre, told ANI that a second mission was due between 2028 and 2030, with a trip of about ten months and a landing attempt using parachutes and motorised descent vehicles. India TV reported that ISRO chairman V Narayanan said the mission would happen in 2030 and attempt India’s first soft landing on Mars, and cited unnamed officials for an orbiter, a lander and a rover still under feasibility study.

At the START 2026 programme in Bengaluru on 11 March 2026, Narayanan said ISRO is working on a Mars landing mission, according to The Hitavada. The sources we found are interviews and speeches, not a published mission plan, and they differ on the date: 2028 to 2030 in Desai’s account, 2030 in the report of Narayanan’s remarks.