Mangalyaan, India’s mission to Mars, completed 5 years

Mangalyaan — India’s mission to Mars — completed five years on September 24, 2019. Initially, the plan was for it to have an innings of six months only. Not only has outlived that many times over, but it is expected to keep orbiting the red planet for even longer. 

Mangalyaan was India's first effort to cross Earth's orbit successfully. Thousands of photographs from the Mars Orbiter Mission helped Indian Space Research Organisation prepare a Martian Atlas. 

Mangalyaan's colour cameras captured close-distance images of Martian moon Phobos and Deimos. It is the only artificial satellite that can click the full disc of Mars in a single frame.

In the process, there was an important discovery: Martian dust storms can rise up to hundreds of kilometres. All this for Rs 4.5 cr, a budget that made India's Mars programme one of the most cost-effective mission of its kind in the world.