Following quickly on the success of India’s moon landing, the country’s space agency launched a rocket on Saturday to study the sun in its first such solar mission. Lauren Anthony reports.
After its recent successful moon landing, India’s space agency has launched a rocket to study the sun.
It’s the country’s first such mission, which aims to study solar winds that can cause disturbance on earth -commonly seen as auroras.
Scientists clapped during the the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO)’s live broadcast, as a rocket left a trail of smoke and fire in its wake on Saturday (September 2).
India’s space agency later said on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that the satellite was now in orbit.
Named after the Hindi word for the sun, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft took flight barely a week after India beat Russia to become the first country to land on the south pole of the moon.
While Russia had a more powerful rocket, India’s Chandrayaan-3 out-endured the Luna-25 to execute a textbook landing.
The Aditya-L1 is designed to travel 930,000 miles over four months, far short of the sun, which is around 93 million miles from earth.
It is meant to stop its journey in a kind of parking lot in space, called a Lagrange Point.
Objects tend to stay put there because of balancing gravitational forces, which reduce a spacecraft’s fuel consumption.
Scientists hope to learn more about the effect of solar radiation on the thousands of satellites in orbit.
ISRO scientists also say that longer term, data from the mission could help better understand the sun’s impact on earth’s climate patterns and the origins of solar wind – the stream of particles that flow from the sun through the solar system.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing for India’s space missions to play a larger role on a world stage dominated by the United States and China.
The country has privatized space launches and is looking to open the sector to foreign investment, as it targets a five-fold increase in its share of the global launch market within the next decade.
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