India’s march to Mars          

India’s prestigious mission to send a spacecraft to Mars got off to a flying start on Tuesday when the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV C-25) lifted off at 2.38 p.m. from the spaceport at Sriharikota and put the Mars Orbiter into a precise elliptical orbit around the earth. The precision achieved was such that the spacecraft went into an orbit with the perigee of 246.9 km and an apogee of 23,560 km against the predicted perigee of 250 km and an apogee of 23,500 km. This signalled the long voyage of the Mars Orbiter for the next 300 days before the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) would attempt to put the spacecraft into mars orbit on September 24, 2014. K. Radhakrishnan, ISRO chairman, said the PSLV in its 25th launch, has precisely put the Mars Orbiter into an elliptical orbit around the earth. He called it a new and complex mission, which has been so far successfully achieved.

Be Proud to be an Indian PSLV-C20 launches 7 satellites

Sriharikota (AP), Feb 25 (PTI):  Indo-French oceanographic
study satellite 'SARAL' and six foreign mini and micro
spacecrafts were succesfully launched today by ISRO's PSLV-C20

rocket from this spaceport.  Indian Space Research Organisation's(ISRO) workhorse

Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle(PSLV) lifted off from the first

launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre at around 6 pm at the

end of the 59-hour countdown and placed in the orbit the

satellites about 22 minutes later. President Pranab Mukherjee witnessed the launch from the mission control centre here, about 110 km from Chennai. The lift-off was rescheduled to 6.01 pm, a five-minute delay, to avoid probability of collision with space debris, a

normal precautionary step in a launch mission, ISRO sources

said. The 410-kg SARAL with payloads -- Argos and Altika --

from French space agency CNES is meant for study of ocean

parameters towards enhancing the understanding of the ocean

state conditions. Besides SARAL, two micro-satellites UniBRITE and BRITE

from Austria, AAUSAT3 from Denmark and STRaND from United

Kingdom as also one micro-satellite (NEOSSat) and one

mini-satellite (SAPPHIRE) from Canada were launched by PSLV,

which yet again proved its versatality recording its 22nd

succesful flight in a row in its 23 missions of which the

first one had failed. SARAL was injected first into the space about 18 minutes

after the lift-off followed by other satellites in the space

of about four minutes.