India’s space agency says it has failed to place the EOS-9 surveillance satellite into the intended orbit after its launch vehicle PSLV-C61 encountered a technical issue in a rare setback for the agency, known for its low-cost projects.

The EOS-09 Earth observation satellite took off on board the PSLV-C61 launch vehicle from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, located in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, on Sunday morning.

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“During the third stage … there was a fall in the chamber pressure of the motor case, and the mission could not be accomplished,” said V Narayanan, chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

“We are studying the entire performance, we shall come back at the earliest,” he said in a statement to local media.

The world’s most populous nation has a comparatively low-budget aerospace programme that is rapidly closing in on the milestones set by global space powers.

Active in space research since the 1960s, India has launched satellites for itself and other countries, and successfully put one in orbit around Mars in 2014.

In August 2023, India became just the fourth nation to land an unmanned craft on the moon after Russia, the United States and China. Since then, ISRO’s ambitions have continued to grow. Its first attempt to land on the moon failed in 2019.

So far, ISRO has recorded three setbacks in PSLV missions, including Sunday’s. The first failure was in 1993.

On Sunday, Narayanan said ISRO would study the performance and provide details on what went wrong at a later stage.

According to local media reports, a Failure Analysis Committee will also be set up to investigate the space agency’s latest setback.