The last 20 Km of missions like these are the hard ones, once you're off the pad. It's roughly 1/3rd between failure to launch, failure to arrive at the destination planet and failure to land (the latter not applicable here since it is an orbiter).<p>60% of the missions fail, which really isn't all that surprising given the complexities of a project like this.<p>Great to see it got this far, hoping that it will complete the interplanetary travel part of the mission around September of this year.<p>Lots of data here:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission</a>
> <i>The Rs 450-crore mission intends to explore the presence of Methane in the Red Planet with the help of five scientific instruments on board the spacecraft.</i><p>That is roughly $75 million.
MOM is ISRO's first inter-planetary mission. I've been following ISRO MOM since its launch - those orbit raising manoeuvres and Trans-Mars Injection were a nail biting experience :) Wishing them best of luck. Eagerly waiting for September 2014, for Mars orbit insertion.<p>Here's a nice interactive animation of NASA MAVEN and ISRO MOM spacecrafts. It fetches real-time data from NASA JPL HORIZONS ephemerides:<p><a href="http://sankara.net/mom.html" rel="nofollow">http://sankara.net/mom.html</a><p>By the way, for space/rocket enthusiasts out there - ISRO will be doing a sub-orbital test of their next gen "monster rocket" GSLV Mk3[1] in June. It will carry a Crew Module[2] as payload. This will be interesting.<p>[1]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launch_Vehicle_Mk_III" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launch...</a><p>[2]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO_Orbital_Vehicle" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO_Orbital_Vehicle</a>
In highly developed countries there is a lot of discussion about the large disparity between the poor and the rich, but India seems to dwarf just everything by orders of magnitude. Every time I read about India's space program I am just unable to comprehend how a nation can at the same time fly to Mars and have a large part of their population live in slums.<p>UPDATE: I just want to clarify - I don't want to judge this as good or bad, I just want to express that I am unable to bend my mind around that.
And <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India</a>
> <i>India's national space agency ISRO would be the fourth after agencies in US, Russia and Europe to have undertaken a successful mission to the red planet.</i><p>Good to see this among all the political slugfest going on in India at the moment.