India Launches Mars Mission | WPN World People News

India has launched a space probe to Mars, seeking to become one of only a few nations to reach the Red Planet.

The unmanned craft blasted off Tuesday from the southeastern island of Sriharikota, the start of a 300-day journey to Mars.

The orbiter will gather data to help determine how weather systems work on Mars. It will also investigate what happened to the water that is believed to have once existed on the planet, and it will look for the chemical methane, a key component to life on Earth.

Only the United States, Russia and the European Union have succeeded in reaching Earth's neighboring planet. More than half the world's attempts to send a probe to orbit Mars have failed, including attempts by Japan and China.

The United States is the only nation to have successfully sent explorers to land on Mars, the most recent being Curiosity.

The U.S. space agency, NASA, said it will help monitor the Indian orbiter from three deep-space facilities. It will also send its own probe, Maven, to Mars later this month.

NASA says some of the data Maven will collect will complement the research gathered by the Indian craft.

If successful, India will have launched the cheapest-ever mission to Mars. The total cost of the mission is $73 million, less than a sixth of the cost of the U.S. mission to Mars set to blast off 13 days later. India has been criticized for allocating funding to its space program while many of its people live in poverty, but New Delhi says the space program helps create economic development and boosts the nation's economy in the long term.

Source: Voice of America