The last Google Doodle of 2014 paid tribute to India’s Mars Orbiter mission along with other significant milestones this year. Google’s latest Doodle on New Year’s Eve is an animated hat tip to World Cup 2014 with a football shown bouncing around the logo, the Rosetta space mission, the Indian Mars mission and the wildly viral ALS Ice Bucket Challenge among others.
A major leap for India’s space research, the country successfully placed its low-cost indigenous MOM spacecraft in orbit around Mars this year to become the first country to achieve this in its very first attempt. The spacecraft beamed back the first images of the red planet and the Indian Space Research Organisation captioned it "The view is nice up here".
The view is nice up here. pic.twitter.com/VmAjNI76lm
— ISRO's Mars Orbiter (@MarsOrbiter) September 25, 2014
Rosetta, a robotic space probe built and launched by the European Space Agency, orbited a comet and landed a robotic probe on its surface for the first time in the history of science.
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge took the world by storm as people doused themselves with cold water to raise funds for the deadly Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Also featured in the doodle is Flappy Bird, the impossibly difficult mobile game that frustrated gamers this year.