New Delhi - India on Wednesday launched its first mission to the moon with a "perfect" lift-off of the unmanned Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, placing the country among a select group of nations that have sent lunar missions.

The 44-metre tall Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket carrying the Chandrayaan probe lifted off at 0622 local time (0052 GMT) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, 80 kilometres north of the southern Chennai city.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chief G Madhavan Nair described it as a "historic moment" as scientists congratulated each other at the space port.

"India has started its journey to the moon," Nair said after the launch, adding "The first leg has gone perfectly well. The spacecraft has been launched into orbit."

"The mission has opened a new chapter in the Indian as well as global space community," he said.

"We will raise the spacecraft's orbit step by step," Nair said adding it was a "complex mission" involving orbit determination, navigation and guidance of the equipment at huge distances.

The Chandrayaan, which means moon craft in Sanskrit, aims to prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon, map the distribution of elements and minerals below the lunar surface and look for water deposits in its polar regions.

The 3.86-billion-rupee (79-million-dollar) Chandrayaan project carries 11 experimental payloads, five of them developed by ISRO and six by the European Space Agency, the United States' NASA and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The solar-powered spacecraft, cuboid in shape and weighing 1,380 kilograms, includes an impact probe that will crash into the surface and plant the Indian national flag around November 15, staking the South Asian country's claims to the moon.

The mission is expected to investigate the presence of helium-3 an isotope, believed to be abundant on the moon and sought for nuclear-fusion research and energy generation.

ISRO scientists said the rocket put Chandrayaan into a "transfer orbit" around Earth 19 minutes after launch.

The spacecraft will make a few orbits of Earth and then fire its onboard motor to take it to a lunar orbit by November 8.

Indian scientists called the mission a major step toward building India's technological capability and will help the nation catch up in a 21st-century space race with Chinese and Japanese spacecraft already orbiting the moon.

It will also lay the foundation to build India's capacities for interplanetary missions in the coming years.

There have been more than 65 manned and unmanned missions to the moon in the past five decades, most of them launched by US and the erstwhile Soviet Union.

India's lunar mission comes at time when there is a renewed interest in the moon as space-faring countries have started planning missions to study its resources and use it as a base for space exploration.

China and Japan launched their respective moon missions Chang'e and Kaguya last year while NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is due to launch in the spring.

"This historic event marks India's entry into the select band of lunar-explorer countries and its growing stature as an emerging space power," Indian Parliament Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said.

India's tryst with space began with the formation of its space agency in 1962. It launched its first satellite 13 years later. In 1984, India sent Rakesh Sharma as its first cosmonaut to the Soviet space station Salyut-7.

In recent years, India concentrated much of its space development on sophisticated satellites, aiming to capture a part of the global commercial satellite launch market.

Chandrayaan-1 is expected to be a stepping stone for the 2010 unmanned Chandrayaan-2 mission, a collaboration with Russia's space agency, which would include a lander and a rover.

ISRO has announced plans to send two astronauts for a week-long space flight by 2015 which would be followed by the country's first manned mission to the moon by 2020. (dpa)