Chandrayaan-1 launch perfect, says Isro

As India's first lunar mission settled into its chosen orbit successfully, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) Chairman G Madhavan Nair described the launch as "perfect" which was achieved after "fighting against all odds".

"It is a historic moment as far as India is concerned. We have started our journey for the moon and the first leg of the journey has gone perfectly well," Nair said seconds after the successful completion of the launch.

"It is a remarkable performance by the launch vehicle," he said.

It is a perfect launch. Now it will be orbiting the earth, he said, adding that today "what we have started is a remarkable journey for the Indian spacecraft to go to the moon and try to unravel the mysteries of the moon".

"We have been fighting against all odds," the noted scientist said explaining that heavy rains and cloudy skies over the last four days had led to a lot of worries about the launch.

"Fortunately, we had clear skies today and we would be completing the remaining part of the journey within 15 days," Nair said.

Other scientists who were present at the launch station attributed the success of the maiden moon mission to a "great teamwork".

While some scientists termed the euphoria of the successful launch as a "thrilling experience", others said that it was like "hitting the bulls eye", "a red letter day for ISRO" and a "glorious mission" as they complimented their "baby" on its soujourn.

"It has been a great team work. We handover the phase-2 of the moon mission to the next teams," a scientist said.

George Koshy, Mission Director said: "It was like that the moon was coming and peeping how we worked..."

As soon as the fourth stage of Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) seperated from the Chandrayaan-1, scientists here broke into raptures.

Tears rolled down from the scientists' eyes as they receieved accolades for their achievement from their counterparts present at the centre.

Chandrayaan-I intends to put a spacecraft into an orbit around the moon to map its nearest celestial neighbour for about two years with eleven payloads (scientific instruments).

It would reach the moon surface in the second week of November. Later, the moon impact probe would be ejected from Chandrayaan-1 over the moon surface in a chosen area.

Following this, cameras and other scientific instruments were turned on and throughly tested. This leads to the operational phase of the mission. This phase lasts about two years during which Chandrayaan-1 would explore the lunar surface with its array of instruments that includes cameras and spectrometers.

Of the the eleven payloads, five are entirely designed and developed in India, three from European Space Agency, one from Bulgaria and two from Nasa.

Chandrayaan-1 aims to achieve scientific knowledge through high-resolution remote sensing of moon in the visible, near infrared, microwave and x-ray regions of electromagnetic spectrum. With this, preparation of a three-dimensional atlas of the lunar surface and chemical and mineralogical mapping of entire moon surface was invisaged.