Chandrayaan-I thunders into the cloudy sky in a bright orange plume dot at 6.22am. The spacecraft will travel around the earth, making larger and still larger elliptical orbits before it is given a final push to get drawn into the moon’s orbit, about five days from now.

The historic launch of India’s maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-I, was carried out successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre here at 6.22 a.m today.

The weather, which threatened to play spoilsport, cleared this morning and enabled scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to go ahead with the launch at the slated time. Though the rain stopped, the overcast sky denied viewers the opportunity of having a good glimpse of the PSLV rocket carrying the lunar satellite on the flight. Mediapersons and the staff of the ISRO, who had gathered on the terrace of the conference hall here, could only see a great plume of bright orange flame at 6.22 a.m. The rocket disappeared behind the clouds soon after take off. Its roar could be heard in the sky.

The launcher and the satellite reached the initial orbit in exactly 18.14 minutes after the blast off. That was when the ISRO scientists, who were monitoring the progress of the PSLV rocket on their computers, congratulated each other. The perigee (nearest point to the earth) of the initial orbit is 250 km and the apogee (farthest point from the earth) is about 23,000 km.

The spacecraft will travel around the earth making larger and still larger elliptical orbits before it is given a final push to get sucked into the moon’s orbit. G. Madhavan Nair, ISRO chairman, said if everything went as planned, the lunar craft would be put into the moon’s orbit on November 8.

The 29 kg moon impact probe (MIP), consisting of a C-band radar altimeter, a video imaging system and a mass spectrometer, will be ejected by the satellite on the surface of the moon on November 14 from a height of 100 km. The box shaped MIP, which will take 20 minutes for its descent on the surface of the moon, will also carry a Tricolour on its top. With the dropping of the Tricolour on the moon by the unmanned mission, India will tell the world that it has truly arrived in the field of research on the moon.

The MIP and the 10 other scientific payloads of the spacecraft are expected to start sending data to the earth from November 14. Consisting of the Indian deep space network (IDSN), the spacecraft control centre (SCC) and the Indian space science data centre (ISSDC), the ground segment of the mission will control the lunar craft through its two-year mission and receive and analyse the data sent by it.

ISRO chairman Nair said Chandrayaan-I was “a perfect example of international cooperation in space science research” as the payloads in the satellite included two American equipments, three equipments of the European Space Agency and one belonging to Bulgaria.

Nair said by the year 2015, India would try to send its first manned mission to the moon with the help of a GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket. M Annadurai, chief of the Chandrayaan-I project, said the ISRO’s next lunar project (Chandrayaan- II), with the objective of landing a rover on the surface of the moon, would also be carried out with the help of an indigenously developed GSLV rocket.