Mars Orbiter Mission

Seventy-three million dollars is what India's Mars Orbiter Mission cost — less, as was frequently noted at the time, than the production budget of the film Gravity, released the same autumn.

The 1,337 kg spacecraft known as Mangalyaan lifted on a PSLV-XL — designated C25 — from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on 5 November 2013. The PSLV lacked the energy for a direct Mars injection, so the mission used a series of Earth-orbit raising manoeuvres before departing on a 298-day transit.

The spacecraft entered Martian orbit on 24 September 2014, making ISRO the fourth space agency to reach Mars and the second — after the European Space Agency in 2003 — to do so on a first attempt.

Mangalyaan transmitted from Mars orbit for seven and a half years.