ISRO's Mangalayan Mission Manages To Capture Detailed Image Of Mars' Largest Moon Phobos

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) recently captured of Phobos, one of Mars’s two moons.

The image was taken on July 1, when the MOM was 7,200 kilometres from Marsh and 4,200 kilometres from Phobos, ISRO said in a statement.

Speaking of the image, ISRO said it was a composite image generated from 6 MCC frames and had been color corrected. “Phobos is largely believed to be made up of carbonaceous chondrites,” ISRO added.

The mission also known as Mangalyaan was initially meant to last six months, but subsequently ISRO had said it had enough fuel for it to last "many years." The country had on September 24, 2014 successfully placed the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft in orbit around the red planet, in its very first attempt, thus breaking into an elite club.

ISRO had launched the spacecraft on its nine-month- long odyssey on a homegrown PSLV rocket from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on November 5, 2013. It had escaped the earth's gravitational field on December 1, 2013.

The Rs 450-crore MOM mission aims at studying the Martian surface and mineral composition as well as scan its atmosphere for methane (an indicator of life on Mars).

The Mars Orbiter has five scientific instruments - Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP), Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM), Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser (MENCA), Mars Colour Camera (MCC) and Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer.

Phobos became something of pop-culture thanks to the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi flick Total Recall, as well as id software’s first-person shooting game in the 1990s, Doom.