It will take 10 months for India's Mars Orbiter Mission to reach the Red Planet after lifting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre near Chennai. Many missions have failed to reach the planet while others have crashed on the surface or contact has been lost before the probes could send back data. Definitive conclusions are likely to be elusive, but the spacecraft's Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM) instrument will aim to make measurements and map any potential sources of methane "plumes". India's space program launched its first Earth satellite in 1975 and put an unmanned probe into orbit around the Moon in 2008. Japan made an attempt with the Nozomi orbiter in 1998 but it failed to reach the planet and a Chinese probe was lost along with the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission in January 2012 . JUST WATCHED A race for space with new players Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH A race for space with new players 01:32 
 
 The U.S. is aiming to build on the success of a series of robots that have roamed the surface of the Red Planet when it launches its own orbiter mission called Maven -- Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft -- scheduled to launch on November 18.
– It may soon get a little more crowded around Mars: India has successfully launched a spacecraft headed for the red planet, putting the country a 300-day journey away from being the fourth space agency to get there, the BBC reports. The Mars Orbiter Mission took off from a base on India's east coast this morning and if it survives the journey, it will carry out experiments including searching for methane in the Martian atmosphere. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the former Soviet Union have successfully sent probes to Mars, but failure is pretty common, CNN notes. Britain's Beagle 2 probe vanished in 2003, a Chinese probe was lost last year, and Japan's Nozomi orbiter was unable to reach its goal in 1998. Some commentators wonder why a country with such high rates of malnutrition is spending money on a Mars program, but the program's defenders say the project is relatively cheap, at $72 million, and will result in technological development that could benefit India's industries.