The Mangalyaan spacecraft beamed its first photos of Mars’ crater-marked surface on Thursday, a day after India successfully put the probe into the red planet’s orbit.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) posted one of the photos, titled First Light, on its Facebook page, showing an orange surface with dark cavities, taken from a distance of 7,300 km. Isro also posted the photo on Twitter with the note, “The view is nice up here.”
An Isro team led by agency chief K Radhakrishnan met the Prime Minister in Delhi on Thursday with hard copies of all the pictures taken by the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) probe. The space agency will release all the photographs this afternoon.