September is marked by a duo of new spacecraft entering the orbit of planet Mars. NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) spacecraft made it to the Red Planet's orbit on Sept. 21 and within just eight hours sent back postcards back to Earth of what is now the mission's first batch of images.
Maven's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument captured images of Mars while the probe was 22,680 miles above the Martian surface. The false-color images, which were released by NASA on Sept. 24, exhibit three different aspects of the Martian atmosphere and were rendered in three primary colors.
The blue-colored image shows ultraviolet light from the sun, which bounces off from a cloud of atomic hydrogen spanning thousands of kilometers above the planet's surface. The image rendered in green shows UV light from the sun reflected off atomic oxygen covering a smaller area compared to that occupied by the cloud of hydrogen. The red image, on the other hand, shows UV sunlight bouncing off the surface of the Red Planet, revealing light reflected from either polar ice or clouds that appear as a bright spot.
"The oxygen gas is held close to the planet by Mars' gravity, while lighter hydrogen gas is present to higher altitudes and extends past the edges of the image," NASA said. "These gases derive from the breakdown of water and carbon dioxide in Mars' atmosphere."
India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft, also known as Mangalyaan, also made it to Mars' orbit on Sept. 24 making history for the country's Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) after the spacecraft became the first to enter the orbit of Mars in the first attempt, a significant achievement given the operational budget for the mission.
The budget for the Mangalyaan mission is about $74 million, which is only a fraction of the budget of the U.S. space agency's $671 million Maven mission.
"MOM never disappoints," Prime Minister Narendra Modi told scientists at the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore. "India is the first country to get this right in the first attempt."
It did not also take long for the Indian probe to capture images of the planet Mars. The camera on board Mangalyaan has captured about 10 images of the surface of the Red Planet, revealing craters, some of which were shared by ISRO on Facebook and Twitter.
