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India has launched its first mission to the Sun this morning, just days after becoming the first country in history to achieve a soft landing of a spacecraft on the Moon’s uncharted south pole.
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft is an unmanned observation satellite that India’s space agency (Isro) wants to use to monitor the Sun’s activities, and learn more about how these impact space weather phenomena such as solar storms.
India’s historic sun mission came just a few weeks after its successful moon landing – for less than the cost of the film Interstellar.
The launch took place at 11.50am local time (7.20am BST) on Saturday morning at the same space centre in Sriharikota in southern India where the country’s historic Chandrayaan-3 moon mission was launched.
Isro says it will take Aditya – which means Sun in Hindi – around four months to reach its final position in a halo orbit around the Sun. It will first enter Low Earth Orbit before taking a more elliptical path and finally use onboard propulsion to push out into a region around the Sun known as the Lagrange Point 1 (L1).
L1 is located around 1.5 million km away from Earth and will allow Aditya a continuous and unobstructed view of the Sun.
Dr Jitendra Singh, India’s minister of state for science and technology, addressed the crowd of Isro scientists after the successful launch of the Aditya-L1 mission by thanking prime minister Narendra Modi, who he credited for “opening up new vistas for India’s new space sector”.
“Thank you, PM Modi for making this happen by opening up new vistas for India’s new space sector and telling us that sky is not the limit,” Mr Singh said.
India has in recent years privatised 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.