Govt of India has released Atlas of Mars on the event of completion of one year of the Mars Orbiter Mission, the first images released, includes the images of the country captured by the orbiter.
Mars is one of the closest celestial objects to the Earth and it has attracted humans towards itself since the time immemorial. A large number of unmanned orbiters, landers and rovers have been launched to reach Mars since early 1960s. These missions had provided large amount of data on various scientific aspects of the Mars.
India as seen by Mars Colour Camera during the Mars Orbiter Mission journey towards Mars Image of craters bisected by fracture system and overlapping crater in Mangala Fossa region located near latitude ~190S, 1590W. The image of these fractures was taken by Mars Colour Camera (MCC) on board Mars Orbiter Mission on 11-02-2015 at a spatial resolution of 202 m from a altitude of 3900 km.The success of Mars Orbiter Mission will highlight more opportunities and help us to learn about the past of earth. You can access the complete press release of the Govt here http://pibphoto.nic.in/documents/rlink/2015/sep/p201592401.pdf
- After successfully completing one year of the mission life around Mars, now a large data set has been acquired by all five payloads of MOM.
- It has obtained Mars Global data showing clouds, dust in atmosphere and surface albedo variations, when acquired from apoapsis at around 72000 km.
- On the other hand high resolution images acquired from periapsis show details of various morphological features on the surface of Mars.
- A large number of unmanned orbiters, landers and rovers have been launched to reach Mars since early 1960s.
- The knowledge acquired by the analysis of these data, suggested enhanced possibility of the presence of life, on this now dry and dusty planet.