New York Times apologizes for cartoon mocking India's Mars Orbiter Mission

NEW YORK, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- The New York Times apologized on Sunday for a cartoon that ran over the weekend disparaging India and its space program.

The toon depicts a farmer and tethered cow -- a figurative stand-in for India and its Mangalyaan mission to Mars -- knocking on the door of the "Elite Space Club," inside which sit two well-dressed westerners drinking coffee and reading the news of India's recent Mars Orbiter Mission.

Critics suggested the image was both rude and racist.

In a Facebook post on Sunday, the Times reported that it had received a number of complaints from readers -- many of them from Indian readers, who shared their anger over the cartoon on Facebook. The paper explained that the cartoon's artist, Singapore-based Heng Kim Song, had no intention of denigrating the Asian subcontinent and its people, but only "highlight how space exploration is no longer the exclusive domain of rich, Western countries."

Earlier this fall, India became the first Asian nation to launch a successful mission to Mars, inserting its Mars Orbiter Mission probe into orbit around the red planet.

Only the space agencies of the United States, Russia and Europe had previously launched Martian missions. And no nation's space agency had ever succeeded in their first attempt to send a spacecraft to Mars, as India did.

Even more impressive, India's mission cost only $74 million, making it one of the cheapest interplanetary space missions of all time.

For their part, NASA has been nothing but complimentary towards the Indian Mars mission.

"It was an impressive engineering feat, and we welcome India to the family of nations studying another facet of the Red Planet. We look forward to MOM adding to the knowledge the international community is gathering with the other spacecraft at Mars," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement last month.