LIFTOFF of Chandrayaan-1! India is on its way to the Moon!

Posted By Emily Lakdawalla

2008/10/21 07:53 CDT

Topics:

It's rising amid a huge flare of smoke...

It seems to have disappeared immediately into cloud....wait, it shot back out...

Everyone in mission control looks so calm!

"Nominal"...

Plus one minute...

Something about tracking...sounded OK...

Was that a shot of the press room? They all looked very calm too, or maybe just focused...

They showed a shot of a realtime flight events chart, it's still counting up, so everything must be good...

Had to run away from the webcast to pull my daughter's dinner off the stove...

Everyone still looks calm...

Lost the feed again...wait, it's back...plus seven minutes...
he chart is showing altitude of 152.5 km, velocity of 7.33 km/s, range 1700 km...that seems short, hmmm, maybe I'm not reading it right...

Ground track shows it halfway to the equator from launch, for what that's worth. The feed keeps sputtering -- I guess they've got heavy demand...

Flight events is showing PS3 sep at 514.5 seconds, PS4 enine start at 535.8 seconds...those will be the different stages of the launch vehicle.

I think I may have lost the feed for good this time. Still, as far as I can tell, everything was working at least through 3rd stage separation. Go Chandrayaan-1!