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Sep. 24, 2014, 7:52 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 24, 2014, 7:55 PM GMT

When India's Mars Orbiter Mission went into orbit around the Red Planet, the achievement made good on a boast as big as Bollywood.

"Our program stands out as the most cost-effective," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said during a June visit to mission control in Bangalore. "There is this story of our Mars mission costing less than the Hollywood movie 'Gravity.' ... Our scientists have shown the world a new paradigm of engineering and the power of imagination."

The $74 million Mars Orbiter Mission, also known by the acronym MOM or the Hindi word Mangalyaan ("Mars-Craft"), didn't just cost less than the $100 million Hollywood blockbuster starring Sandra Bullock. The price tag is a mere one-ninth of the cost of NASA's $671 million Maven mission, which also put its spacecraft into Mars orbit this week.

The differential definitely hints at a new paradigm for space exploration — one that's taking hold not only in Bangalore, but around the world. At the same time, it hints at the dramatically different objectives for MOM and Maven, and the dramatically different environments in which those missions took shape.

Science vs. technology

MOM is primarily a technology demonstration mission, and secondarily a scientific endeavor. Just as the first Space Age served to demonstrate U.S. vs. Soviet technology on a world stage, MOM serves as an advertisement for India's satellite launch industry. The Mars mission builds upon India's first moon mission, Chandrayaan 1, which went into lunar orbit in 2008.

The MOM orbiter's 33-pound (15-kilogram) scientific payload comprises five instruments that will monitor Mars' atmosphere and weather, take color pictures of the surface and map the planet's mineralogy over the course of six months. In contrast, Maven's 143-pound (65-kilogram) payload includes nine instruments to study Mars' upper atmosphere as part of a yearlong mission and a decades-long scientific campaign. It can also serve as a relay for communications with NASA probes on the Martian surface.

"MOM is essentially a first-time test of technology and capability, whereas Maven is primarily a scientific mission utilizing the development of now well-proven U.S. technology," engineer and technology manager Krishna Pillai wrote in his KTwoP blog last November when both probes were launched. "Technology development on the one hand, and a scientific investigation on the other."

Because MOM's scientific payload is so small, it could use a low-cost, made-in-India PSLV launcher — and even at that, the probe had to go through an orbit-stretching series of maneuvers to travel from Earth to Mars. Maven blasted off for Mars atop a much more powerful Atlas 5 rocket — but the launch services alone cost $187 million, which is more than twice MOM's total mission cost.

"As missions go, Maven represents a Mercedes 'S' class to the Volkswagen that is MOM," Pillai wrote.