Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), the truly maiden interplanetary mission of ISRO, launched on November 5, 2013 successfully got inserted into Martian orbit on September 24, 2014 in its first attempt. MOM completes 4 years in its orbit on September 24, 2018 though the designed mission life of MOM was six months. MOM is credited with many laurels like cost-effectiveness, short period of realization, economical weight-budget, miniaturization of five heterogeneous science payloads etc. Satellite is in good health and continues to work as expected.
MOM is built with full autonomy to take care of itself for long periods without any ground intervention. The spacecraft came out of communication ‘blackout’ and ‘whiteout’ geometry successfully during this period.
ISRO made an Announcement of Opportunity (AO) through its website seeking for proposals to expand the scientific community within the country that can access and analyse MOM data. A planetary data analysis workshop was conducted to enhance exposure and reach of MOM-AO scientists.
Initial two years data of MOM were released to public through ISSDC website https://mrbrowse.issdc.gov.in/MOMLTA/. Third year data are ready to be released to public. More than 2100 users have registered and downloaded more than 620 GB data so far.
Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars were also imaged from close distances by Mars Colour Camera (MCC) camera and MOM is the only Martian artificial satellite which could image the full disc of Mars in one view frame and also image the far side of Deimos.
Mars Colour Camera has acquired 980+ images so far. Mars Atlas has already been prepared. MOM has produced twenty three publications in peer reviewed journals.