India’s launch vehicle lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota yesterday, carrying the Astrosat, India’s first dedicated space observatory.

Agencies/Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh

India yesterday successfully launched its first high-tech telescopes into space to study the stars, as New Delhi seeks to take another major step in its ambitious and low-cost space programme.
A rocket carrying the 150-tonne mini space observatory called Astrosat, along with six foreign satellites, blasted off on schedule from the main southern spaceport of Sriharikota.
“About 20 minutes after a perfect lift off at 10am from our spaceport, the rocket has placed Astrosat in the intended orbit,” mission director B Jayakumar said at Sriharikota, about 90km from Chennai.
With the successful launch, India gained an entry into the select club of nations having its own space observatory after the US, Japan, Russia and Europe.
The launch by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) comes one year after India became the first Asian country to launch a successful mission to Mars to study the Red Planet, beating giant rival China and sparking an outpouring of national pride.
The unmanned probe, still orbiting Mars, cost a fraction of the missions launched earlier by the US, Russia and Europe.
India’s Astrosat, which includes a telescope that uses X-ray, is expected to orbit 650km above the Earth and will send back data and study parts of the universe including black holes and the magnetic fields of stars.
Astrosat, which reportedly cost Rs1.8bn ($27mn) to build, has been compared by local media to the famous Hubble telescope launched by Nasa in 1990. But Astrosat is much smaller and has a limited life span of five years.
The rocket also carries six foreign satellites, including four from the US.
According to an official of Antrix Corporation, the commercial arm of ISRO, a deal has been signed to put into orbit nine American nano/micro satellites by the end of 2016.
Astrosat will be able to detect objects in multiple wavelengths such as X-rays, but with far lower precision than Hubble, said Mayank Vahia of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
“This will bring little commercial advantage but will show India’s new capability in space research,” said Vahia, whose institute made three of the five scientific instruments aboard Astrosat.
The Astrosat instruments will transmit data to a control centre in Bengaluru that will manage the satellite during its five-year mission life.  
At the mission control room, space scientists were glued to their computer screens watching the rocket escaping the Earth’s gravitational pull.
Just over 22 minutes into the flight, the rocket slug Astrosat at an altitude of 650km above the Earth.
Soon after, six other satellites were put into orbit and the whole mission ended in just over 25 minutes.
The launch comes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi winds up a visit to Silicon Valley in the US where he urged top technology companies to bring investment and jobs to India.
India’s successful and frugal Mars mission dominated newspaper front pages at the time and sparked huge pride in its home-grown space programme, while Modi hailed it as a sign of the country’s technological potential.
Critics of the programme say a country that struggles to feed its people adequately and where roughly half have no toilets should not be splurging on space travel.
Despite the recent successes, the growth of India’s space programme has been stymied by lack of heavier launchers and slow execution of missions - during 2007-2012, only about half of the planned 60 missions were accomplished.
In December, India successfully tested a new, more powerful rocket - the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark III - that can put heavier payloads into space, but it is not yet operational.

India to launch 23 foreign satellites
India has signed up contracts to launch 23 foreign satellites soon, an official of Antrix Corporation said yesterday. Antrix is the commercial arm the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). “Out of 23 foreign satellites, two will go in two separate rockets. The remaining 21 satellites will piggy-back on a bigger Indian satellite,” the official said. He said ISRO would soon launch six Singapore satellites weighing a total of around 660kg. According to him, the bigger of the six is an earth observation satellite, weighing 410kg. Two are micro-satellites, weighing 130kg and 80kg respectively. The remaining three are nano-satellites, cumulatively weighing 30kg. According to the official, ISRO will also launch five small satellites from the US before 2016 as a piggy-back luggage. So far India has launched 51 foreign satellites for a fee. ISRO chairman A S Kiran Kumar said things are changing with the US. “We are having more and more interaction with the US.”