Indis’s Mars Orbiter Mission:

The significance of this mission is the effort to find presence of methane gas in the Martian atmosphere. Utilizing the indigenously made technology, Mangalyaan is equipped with an instrument to sense the presence of methane gas called Methane Sensor for Mars. Speculation has been that some methane-producing bugs, or methanogens, could perhaps exist on Mars. Earth contains billions of tones of methane.

The 1,350 kg MOM spacecraft is equipped with five instruments including a sensor to track methane or marsh gas a possible sign of life, a color camera and a thermal imaging spectrometer to map the surface and mineral wealth of the Red Planet.

It carries five specific payloads to observe the Martian space and atmosphere expanding up to 80,000 kilometers for a spatial understanding of the planet’s evolution. These payloads are A Mars Color Camera, Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP), and two spectrometers. Other components along with payloads are Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA), MSM and Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS).

Current Mars Missions are NASA’s MAVEN, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express Orbiter, Curiosity Rover, Opportunity Rover, Mar’s Odyssey Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express Orbiter

NASA is ambitious to launch EXO Mars Orbiter-2016, EXO Mars Rover-2018, 2020 Mission in the future.

The scientists say that the technologies to be utilized in future would be for closer study with airplanes and balloons, subsurface explorers and sample returns, to study the sky above mars, geology of the surface and the rock samples, respectively

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