India's space agency has released a blurry image of Mars pockmarked with giant craters. The image was taken by the nation's first interplanetary spacecraft after it began orbiting the red planet.
Indian Space and Research Organization said the image, which was released Thursday, was taken while the Martian Orbiter Mission, or MOM, was about 4,536 miles from the planet's surface.
It took 12 minutes for the digital data to reach Earth, according to the Associated Press.
Space agency scientists released the image after bringing it to New Delhi to show to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi spent Wednesday morning witnessing the satellite's last maneuvers into orbit from the space agency's Mars command center in Bangalore.
"The view is nice up here," scientists tweeted under a special mission profile, @MarsOrbiter, which has gained more than 95,000 followers since being set up on Tuesday.
Modi responded back through his Twitter feed: "Yes, I agree @MarsOrbiter, the view is indeed nice up there!"
The satellite will now spend the next six months on an elliptical orbit. It will reach as close as 227 miles and swing out to 49,700 miles at its farthest, while collecting scientific data on the Martian atmosphere, according to the Associated Press.
The U.S. space agency NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden, congratulated the Indian scientists in a statement Wednesday.
"It was an impressive engineering feet, and we welcome India to the family of nations studying another facet of the Red Planet. We look forward to MOM adding to the knowledge the international community is gathering with the other spacecraft at Mars," the statement said, according to AP.
On Sept. 21, NASA had its own success in placing its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or Maven, in orbit around the planet.
There are two other NASA satellites and one ESA craft also now orbiting Mars, and two NASA rovers are on the surface.
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