Ahead of the release of their film, the cast of Mission Mangal- Akshay Kumar, Vidya Balan, Sonakshi Sinha and Nithya Menen - shed light into some fun facts about the Mangalyaan Mars mission. Here they are:
1. Do you know what the distance from Earth to Mars is? 670 million kilometres!
2. Do you also know that India is the only country in the world to have entered the orbit of Mars in the first attempt, and that too with 100% accuracy?
3. NASA took 5 years to make their orbiter MAVEN, while we took only 5 months!
4. The budget of this entire mission was only Rs 450 crores. The Hollywood film Gravity’s budget was also more than this. Let’s hope our film’s box office collections are that much!
5. It completed its 100th day in space on 12 February, 2014. Had it happened two days later it would be a Valentine's Day present to Mars from Earth.
6. If you calculate the cost of travelling from Earth to Mars, it is around Rs 6.7/km, lesser than that of a rickshaw also.
7. 'Mangalyaan' carries a camera that has acquired over 980 images so far. The mission has also helped scientists successfully prepare a global atlas of Mars. Interesting, right?
8. In November 2013, the spacecraft was launched and in September 2014 it landed in Mars, so we made a trip to Mars in just a little over 365 days.
9. Around 500 scientists worked on this mission and 27% of them were women... so goodbye to all that Mars is for men and all that!
10. The weight of the orbiter is 1350 kgs, lesser than that of an SUV also.
11. India is the fourth country to send a probe to Mars after US, Russia and Europe. We nailed it!
Camera: Sanjoy Deb
Assistant Camera: Gautam Sharma
Video Editor: Ashish MacCune
Producer: Nandakumar Rammohan
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