facts about mars mission

1.    India's first mission to Mars, if successful, will place the country in an exclusive club of nations capable of sending probes to the Red Planet.

2.    The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched the Mars orbiter mission at 2.38 pm (IST) from a pad at the agency's Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, about 80 km from Chennai.

3.    The Rs 450-crore ($73.5 million) Mars mission will send the Mangalyaan spacecraft (the name is Hindi for "Mars Craft") on an 11-month trek to Mars to study the planet's atmosphere and surface from orbit. 

4.    PSLV C-25 will put Mangalyaan weighing 1,340 kilograms in the earth orbit. To reach Mars, the spacecraft has to enter three phases, the earth centered phase, the helio centric phase and finally the Martian phase.

5.    The spacecraft carries five instruments to study Mars, but its primary purpose is to serve as a technology demonstrator for future Indian interplanetary probes, ISRO officials have said.

6.    It has been configured to carry out observations of the physical features of the Mars and also to carry out a limited study of the Martian atmosphere.

7.    According to reports, Mangalyaan, the first inter-planatory mission to the red planet is primarily a technological machine.

8.    "Orbiting Mars itself is a challenge," said ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan, according to the Times of India. "This is our first interplanetary mission. There will be bigger missions later." Mangalyaan will be 365 km away from the surface of Mars at its nearest point from the planet.

9.    The risks for the mission are high. It's tough to reach Mars with spacecraft, and more than half of the 40 missions launched to the Red Planet since 1960 have failed.

10.    The mission was initially slated to launch on Oct. 28, but was pushed back when bad weather delayed the ships that will track the spacecraft after it separates from its rocket, ISRO officials said.

 This content is taken from various newspaper and yahoo website.