MOM Makes It To Mars!
Hey Space Placers! Congratulations to India for their Mars Orbital Mission (MOM) spacecraft safely reaching Mars AND entering Martian orbit . This is no easy feat as the U.S. and former U.S.S.R. can tell you from the destroyed spacecraft that tried. Here is the NASA Administrator's statement on MOM. So we now have 4 spacecraft orbiting Mars NASA MAVEN NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ESA Mars Express ISRO MOM and two operating on the surface NASA Curiosity NASA Opportunity More unmanned missions will follow in the years to come and NASA is taking the necessary steps for a manned mission to the Red Planet with its "The Next Giant Leap" initiative. The two biggest obstacles to getting humans to Mars are the human body and political will. We will be able to overcome the former with all of the biomedical research being done on the International Space Station (ISS) but the latter is a different story. Perhaps a truly international collaboration of spac...