| Summary/Abstract |
The Moon and Mars have stirred the imagination of space scientists since ages because of their relative proximity to Earth, as compared with other heavenly bodies. The Moon, located at a distance of 38,000 km, is the heavenly body nearest to the Earth. It is natural that our satellite remained the object of the first research since the beginning of the Space Age. Mars, the fourth planet in the solar system after Earth, has a year of 687 days and a day which differs from the Earth-day by a little less than half an hour; it is smaller as well as lighter than the Earth and less dense too with its gravity just about 38 percent of the gravity on Earth. It has two satellites: Phobos and Deimos. Soon after the dawn of the Space Age in 1957, both the US and erstwhile USSR initiated numerous projects to carry out wide-sweeping reconnaissance of the solar system, including the Moon and Mars, during the 1960s and 1970s. This was followed by increasing European and Japanese activities in the area of interplanetary exploration in 1980.1 Since then, there has been an overall continuity in nations attempting interplanetary exploration. India, with its robust space programme, has been making steady progress in deep space exploration, along with other space-faring nations right from the beginning.
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