Click to play videoSriharikota, Andhra Pradesh: India’s first unmanned flight to the moon blasted off from Sriharikota, off the Andhra Pradesh coast, early morning on Wednesday.
A 44-metre-tall and 316-tonne rocket called the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV C11) carried the 1,380-kg lunar orbiter Chandrayaan 1 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at exactly 0622 hrs IST.
IANS reports the PSLV started to move into its designated orbit within minutes, to sling Chandrayaan into geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), as scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) cheered on.
From the GTO the satellite's onboard liquid apogee motor (LAM) will be fired to take it to the lunar orbit—387,000 km from earth—around November 8.
Once the 1,380-kg Chandrayaan gets near the moon its speed will be reduced to enable the gravity of the moon to capture it into an elliptical orbit.
At the earliest possible opportunity Chandrayaan will drop its Moon Impact Probe (MIP) which will land on the moon's soil carrying India's flag, among many scientific instruments. After that, the spacecraft will also activate its cameras and other instruments on board.
ISRO scientists said the launch was perfect and there was zero error during the four of its phases. Speaking minutes after the successful liftoff ISRO Chairperson G Madhavan Nair described the moment as "historic".
"India has started its journey to the moon. The first leg has gone perfectly. The spacecraft has been launched into orbit," he said.
Mission statement
Chandrayaan will orbit the moon for two years. A principal objective of Chandrayaan is to look for Helium 3, an isotope which is very rare on earth but is sought to power nuclear fusion and could be a valuable source of energy in the future, some scientists believe. It is thought to be more plentiful on the moon, but still rare and very difficult to extract.
The Rs 386-crore mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water. "We are going to get a three-dimensional atlas of the moon's surface, which will be used for chemical and mineralogical mapping of the entire lunar surface," Bhaskar Narayan, an ISRO director told Reuters.
While much of the technology involved in reaching the moon has not changed, analysts say current mapping equipment allows for the exploration of new areas, including below the surface.
Of the 11 instruments carried by Chandrayaan, five are Indian, three are from the European Space Agency, two from the US and one from Bulgaria.
NASA is sending up a Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar that can search for ice — an important resource for any human settlements — under the lunar poles.
India is the sixth nation to send a nation to send a mission to moon after the US, former Soviet Union, European Space Agency, China and Japan. The United States is the only nation to have landed a man on the lunar surface, doing so for the first time in 1969.
In 2003, China became the first Asian country to put its own astronauts into space. It followed that last month with its first spacewalk.
Last year China also blasted an old satellite into oblivion with a land-based anti-satellite missile, the first such test ever conducted by any nation, including the United States and Russia.
(With inputs from IANS, Reuters and AP)
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