India plans to take another major step on Saturday with the launch of a probe to explore the sun, a week after the successful landing of an unmanned vehicle near the moon’s south pole.
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Aditya-L1, “Sun” in Hindi, will carry scientific instruments to observe the outer layers of the Sun.
It will take off at 11:50 a.m. (06:20 GMT) for a four-month journey to its destination 1.5 million kilometers away.
NASA and the European Space Agency have already launched devices into orbit to study the sun, but this will be a first for India.
“This is an ambitious mission for India,” astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told NDTV on Friday.
Raychaudhury said the probe will study coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that results in enormous discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun’s atmosphere.
They are so powerful that they can reach Earth and potentially disrupt satellite operations.
Aditya will help predict these phenomena “and alert everyone so that the satellites can turn off their power,” the astrophysicist added.
The study satellite will be carried by the 320-tonne PSLV XL rocket developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It is one of the pillars of India’s space program and has already conducted launches to the Moon and Mars.
India’s aerospace program has a relatively modest budget, but it has increased significantly since the first attempt to put a probe into orbit around the moon in 2008.
According to industry experts, India is managing to keep costs down by replicating and adapting existing space technology for its purposes, particularly thanks to the large number of highly qualified engineers who are paid significantly less than their foreign counterparts.
Last month’s successful moon landing – a feat previously achieved only by Russia, the US and China – cost less than $75 million (€70 million).
In 2014, India became the first Asian country to place a spacecraft into orbit around Mars. A three-day manned mission around the Earth is scheduled to be launched by next year.
A joint mission with Japan plans to send a probe to the moon by 2025 and a mission to Venus within two years.