ISRO on Wednesday placed in orbit seven satellites including Oceansat-2 within a span of 20 minutes, its first successful mission after the abrupt end of the ambitious Chandrayaan-I project.

At the end of the 51-hour countdown, the 44.4 meter tall four-stage PSLV-C14 blasted off from the first launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre here with ignition of the core first stage and put the satellites in orbit one after another.

Scientists cheered as ISRO's workhorse, PSLV soared majestically into clear skies at 11.51 AM from the spaceport in the East Coast in Andhra Pradesh, about 100 km north of Chennai, with the launch watched by Vice President Hamid Ansari

Oceansat-2, the country's 16th remote sensing satellite, will identify potential fishing zones, sea state forecasting and coastal zone studies, besides providing inputs on weather forecasting and climate studies.

A set of six nano satellites rode piggyback accompanying Oceansat-2 on its trip to orbit.

Ansari and senior scientist M G K Menon, who were present in the mission centre, congratulated ISRO scientists soon after the successful launch.

Besides two German Rubin nano satellites, other Oceansat-2 co-passengers are four cubesats: Beesat, built by Technical University Berlin, UWE-2 (University of Wuerzburg Germany), ITU-pSat(Istanbul Technical University Turkey) and SwissCube-1 (Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Switzerland).

ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair, addressing scientists, described it as "a perfect and precise launch."

Congratulating space scientists for the fantastic achievement, Nair said "the launch has once again proved our capability. It is an example of fine teamwork and the maturity of PSLV launch vehicle has been proved."

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