India’s Mars Orbiter programme team has been honoured with the 2015 Space Pioneer Award in the science and engineering category by US based National Space Society (NSS).According to the NSS, the India’s Mars mission achieved two significant mission firsts
1 An Indian spacecraft that has gone into orbit around Mars on the very first try and that no other country has ever done this.
2 The spacecraft is in an elliptical orbit with a high apoapsis, and has a high resolution camera which is taking full-disk colour imagery of Mars.