India launched the latest mission in its ambitious space program on Saturday for a trip to the center of the solar system, a week after successfully landing an unmanned vehicle near the moon’s south pole.
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The Aditya-L1 spacecraft, known as “Sun” in Hindi, was launched at 11:50 a.m. (06:20 GMT) and a live television broadcast showed hundreds of spectators cheering wildly amid the deafening noise of the rocket’s ascent.
“The launch was successful, everything is normal,” an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) official announced from the mission control center as the spacecraft flew towards Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The mission carries scientific instruments to observe the sun’s outer layers during a four-month journey.
The United States and the European Space Agency (ESA) have already put devices into orbit to study the sun, starting with NASA’s Pioneer program in the 1960s, but this will be a first for India.
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Both Japan and China have launched their own solar observation missions into Earth orbit.
However, if successful, ISRO’s latest mission will be the first to be launched into orbit around the sun by an Asian country.
“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.
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Aditya will help predict these phenomena “and alert everyone so that the satellites can turn off their power,” the astrophysicist added.
According to him, “This will also help us understand how these things happen, and in the future we may not need a warning system.”
Aditya will travel 1.5 million kilometers to reach his destination, which is still just one percent of the vast distance between the Earth and the Sun.
At this point, the gravitational forces of the two celestial bodies cancel each other out, allowing the mission to remain in a stable orbit around our nearest star.
The study satellite will be carried by the 320-tonne ISRO-developed PSLV XL rocket, which is one of the pillars of India’s space program and has already conducted launches to the Moon and Mars.
The mission also aims to shed light on the dynamics of several other solar phenomena by imaging and measuring particles in the sun’s upper atmosphere.
Modest budget
India has consistently achieved the successes of established space powers and at a fraction of the cost.
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.
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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 United States and China – cost less than $75 million.
It was widely celebrated by the public, with prayer rituals for the success of the mission and school children watching the final descent through live broadcasts into classrooms.
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 should make it possible to send a probe to the moon by 2025 and a mission to Venus within two years.