Here's why you should pay close attention to India's space program

While India's space agency may not be the first organization you think about when it comes to space travel, there are many reasons we should all be following its progress.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has been building a space program with a bright future, and it's starting to pay off. 

SEE ALSO: India's space agency launches 8 satellites into 2 orbits

India stands apart from other big players in space exploration. Unlike the reasons for forming the U.S. and Russian space programs, India's goals for space travel aren't mainly motivated by nationalistic competition. Instead, the ISRO was founded to spur on technological development "while pursuing space science research and planetary exploration," according to the space agency's vision.

The ISRO is in the process of building new, more powerful rockets and launching record-numbers of spacecraft to orbit. The space agency also has its eye on far-flung planetary prizes that would propel it into the most elite ranks of space agencies around the world.

Here are just a few of the many milestones the ISRO has reached in the past few years: 

On Monday, India's space program launched its most powerful rocket yet

The ISRO performed its first test launch of the GSLV Mark III rocket, the most powerful launcher yet built by the space agency. 

"This was the first orbital mission of GSLV MkIII which was mainly intended to evaluate the vehicle performance," the ISRO said in a statement. 

While this launch was designed to test out the launcher's capability, it also successfully lofted the heaviest satellite yet built in India to orbit. 

India has a Mars mission

The ISRO's Mars mission was a huge milestone for the agency when the probe arrived at the red planet in 2014. 

By successfully bringing the Mangalyaan spacecraft into orbit around Mars, the country was propelled into the upper-echelons of space-faring nations around the world. 

In total, only spacecraft from four space agencies including India's have successfully orbited Mars.

Mangalyaan is still going strong in orbit around the red planet. The probe is gathering data about the planet's thin atmosphere and taking photos of the world's surface in the hopes of learning more about Mars' past. 

One of the main goals of the mission is to sniff out any methane that might be lurking in the atmosphere, giving scientists a clue about possible past life on the world.

One of India's rockets launched a record number of satellites at once

An ISRO rocket launch in February blew a spaceflight record out of the water by launching 104 satellites all at once. 

The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) mission beat the previous record of 37 satellites launched simultaneously by a Russian rocket in 2014. 

The February PSLV launch brought 88 small Dove satellites to orbit for the Silicon Valley-based Earth-monitoring company Planet, along with an Earth-gazing satellite for India. 

The ISRO is planning its second moon mission

Image: nasa

India wants to launch its second mission to the moon in 2018. 

The Chandrayaan 2 lander — named as the predecessor to the Chandrayaan 1 mission in 2008 — is designed to go down to the lunar surface and sample moon dirt.

But before any of that, it's possible a private company based in India will actually launch a lander to the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize.

The X Prize competition will award a $30 million grand prize to the first company to launch a spacecraft, land it on the moon, and perform a series of tasks.

The ISRO also wants to land a robot on Mars and fly to Venus

According to a report from ScienceInsider, the ISRO is also planning a robotic mission to Mars for sometime in the early 2020s, and a mission to Venus not long after. 

The Mars mission will likely focus on building a lander and safely bringing it to the red planet's surface, the report says.

Setting a lander down on Mars is a much more complex engineering challenge than getting one into orbit, so scientists will be working toward figuring out how to surmount that challenge for the next few years before launch. 

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