Credit: ISRO/AP

India's first lunar spacecraft is set to swing into orbit round the Moon on 8 November.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched Chandrayaan-1 (pictured) on 22 October from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, southern India.

The craft is carrying six foreign and five Indian scientific instruments designed to create a three-dimensional map of the Moon and study the lunar soil, among other things. The spacecraft will also search for frozen water and measure the abundance of helium-3.

The ISRO is now planning Chandrayaan-2, which would take a Russian-built rover to the Moon's surface by 2012. The agency also aims to send two Indians into space by 2015, in a mission that will cost roughly 120 billion rupees (US$2.4 billion).