More than a week after successfully landing a rover on the moon, India on Saturday launched its first solar mission aimed at studying the sun’s outer layers.
Aditya L1, as the mission is called, weighs about 3,300 pounds and will travel a distance of about 930,000 miles in four months. It will continue to orbit for several years, while sending data back to Earth.
The spacecraft is designed to study the outer layers of the sun, its chromosphere and corona, to better understand the physics and dynamics of our local star.
“I am very happy that Aditya L1 was injected into the intended orbit flawlessly,” said Nigar Shaji, project director, after the successful launch.
Ms. Shaji, calling the mission an asset to “the nation’s heliophysics and the global scientific fraternity,” said the spacecraft will now continue “its 125-day long journey to L1.”
A large crowd, including children in school uniform, watched the rocket launch in the midday heat from the viewing gallery of the Satish Dhawan Space Center, the launch facility in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Many of them carry colorful umbrellas to protect from the sun.
Last month, India became the fourth country to land on the moon, and the first to reach its south polar region, with its Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft. It was the country’s second attempt at landing on the moon, after its Chadrayan 2 craft crashed in 2019, and came just days after the crash of a Russian lander, also aimed at the southern polar region.
The recent achievements of India’s space program have paralleled the country’s growth as an economic and geopolitical power, and officials have cited them as a manifestation of its strong tradition in science and technology. India’s space research agency, called ISRO, has achieved its goals on a budget smaller than many other space-faring nations.
India’s solar mission is the latest in a string of sun probes; some by NASA, both individually and in collaboration with the European space agency, and others by China and Japan.
The Aditya L1 spacecraft is carrying seven payloads, including remote sensing instruments. After it has traveled nearly a million miles, the craft will be placed into a halo orbit called Lagrange point 1 (L1), which will provide an uninterrupted view of the sun and its activities and its effects on space weather in real time.
With increasing attention and competition in space, understanding space weather becoming essential for planning missions and protecting satellites and spacecraft. Indian scientists hope the data provided by Aditiya L1 will add to the knowledge of potential perturbations in space weather traced back to solar energy, and help predict such perturbations.
“These, together, will give you a lot of information not only about the sun but also about the heliosphere,” said Annapurni Subramaniam, the director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, about the spacecraft’s payloads.
The team of Dr. Subramaniam designed one of the main payloads on the spacecraft, the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, which will detect emission lines of certain elements from the sun’s corona, the outermost part of the sun’s atmosphere.
“This instrument looks at the sun as if it were always in total solar eclipse,” he said. “You want to have an eclipse all the time because you want to see the corona.”
