Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

India has rocketed itself into the Asian space race.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched its first unmanned lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, from the Sriharikota space centre in southern India at 6:20 am India time (8:50 pm ET).

It’s a proud day for the country, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said after. “When completed, this mission will put India in the very small group of six countries which have thus far sent space missions to the moon,” he told Australia’s ”https://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/22/2398585.htm?section=world">ABC News.

To date, only the US, Russia, countries within the European Space Agency, Japan and China have sent missions to the moon.

Successfully sending the probe there is India’s first attempt to earn the “kind of credential” necessary to be part of the larger community “privileged enough to explore outer space”, Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, a member of the Indian parliament and former chairman of the ISRO, told Nature.

Past missions have told scientists much about the composition and origin of the moon, but many questions remain, Kasturirangan said. With Chandrayaan-1’s 11 instruments, an international team of scientists will make the “best” high-resolution images of the moon’s surface, detect the chemical breakdown of the lunar soil and rocks and search for evidence of water ice, he explained.

But, beyond the science, the successful launch reinforces ISRO’s reputation as a “major player in commercial launch systems,” C.S. Unnikrishnan, a scientist with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in Mumbai, told the Wall Street Journal. Since 2001, ISRO has launched satellites for customers from Indonesia, Belgium, Germany and Argentina, the paper reports.

Kasturirangan also told Nature that one of the other non-science drivers behind the mission is to inspire the next generation of Indian scientists. The goal is to create the interest and infrastructure for a Chandrayaan-2 and possibly for manned missions to the Moon and beyond, he said.

Chandrayaan-2 is shaping up to be an unmanned Indo-Russian joint venture to the moon and is expected to launch by the end of next year or early 2010, the Economic Times reports. As for putting Indians on the lunar surface, ISRO is currently planning to go it alone to achieve the feat, possibly as early as 2015, according to India’s Hindu news site.