Radhakrishnan was in a control room in Bangalore that morning, watching a burn he couldn't do a thing about. The signal took something like twelve minutes to cross, so by the time the telemetry said the engine had lit, the engine had already finished. You're not steering. You're reading the mail.

And the arithmetic of it is lovely. The rocket they had, a PSLV, couldn't throw the thing straight at Mars, so the orbiter spent nearly a month going round and round Earth, nudging its high point out a little further each pass — six burns, then a seventh to make up for one that came in short — before it finally let go on the first of December 2013. Dry, the spacecraft was about 500 kilos. A big touring motorbike. That's the object that went. The main engine then sat cold for roughly three hundred days, so a couple of days before arrival they lit it for four seconds just to see whether it still would!

Fourth agency ever to get into orbit there, and the only one to manage it on a first try, in 2014. The artist's rendering has it as this boxy grey thing with one long blue solar wing, Mars filling the frame behind. Smaller than you'd draw it from the story. If you want the real one, Mars is a morning object now — east, before the sun.