Bangalore: "Howdy @MarsCuriosity ? Keep in touch. I'll be around". This and a few other tweets announced the "Mars arrival" of India's Mangalyaan, and its new Twitter account.

NASA's mission Curiosity was the first to tweet to the account with a greeting, "Namaste, @MarsOrbiter! Congratulations to @ISRO and India's first interplanetary mission upon achieving Mars orbit."

NASA's 2014 Mars mission Maven also congratulated ISRO, or the Indian Space Research Organisation.

The account @MarsOrbiter debuted just as Mangalyaan successfully entered the planet's orbit this morning. Within two hours, the account had 22,000 followers and was rising rapidly.

Its first few tweets had a humorous twist: "What is red, is a planet and is the focus of my orbit?" - re-tweeted 6,000 times - and "I'll be back after breakfast. Good ol' sunlight. It's good for your battery."

The tweets and the exchange between three missions delighted @MarsOrbiter's growing legion of followers. "Brilliant! @MarsOrbiter interacting with @MarsCuriosity. That's the beauty of @twitter," said one post.

On Twitter, Mangalyaan is a top trending topic in India and worldwide after creating history by entering the orbit of Mars on its first attempt. The top nine trending topics in India are all about the Mars mission.

Many tweets were posted from the account of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is one of India's most twitter-savvy politicians and who watched the space milestone from the ISRO centre in Bangalore.

With a spacecraft around Mars, India today joined a small group of nations - the United States, Russia and Europe - who have succeeded in their Mars missions.


NDTV