India’s space program yesterday blasted off a spacecraft toward the center of the solar system, a week after the country’s successful uncrewed moon landing.
The launch of the Aditya-L1 was broadcast live shortly before midday, showing hundreds of spectators cheering against the deafening noise of the rocket’s ascent.
“Launch successful, all normal,” an official from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced from mission control as the vessel traveled toward the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Photo: indian Space Research Organisation via AP
The mission is carrying scientific instruments to observe the sun’s outermost layers in a four-month journey.
The US and the European Space Agency (ESA) have sent numerous probes to the center of the solar system, beginning with NASA’s Pioneer program in the 1960s.
Japan and China have both launched their own solar observatory missions into the Earth’s orbit.
Photo: AFP
However, if the latest ISRO mission was to be successful, it would be the first by any Asian nation to be placed in orbit around the sun.
“It is a challenging mission for India,” astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told broadcaster NDTV on Friday.
Raychaudhury said the mission probe would study coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that sees huge discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the sun’s atmosphere. These bursts are so powerful they can potentially reach the Earth and disrupt the operation of satellites.
Aditya-L1 can help predict the phenomenon “and alert everybody so that satellites can shut down their power,” he said. “It will also help us understand how these things happen, and in the future, we might not need a warning system out there.”
Aditya-L1 is to travel 1.5 million kilometers to reach its destination — still only 1 percent of the vast distance between Earth and the sun. At that point, the gravitational forces of both celestial bodies cancel each other out, allowing the mission to remain in a stable orbit around the sun.
Aditya-L1 would be traveling on the ISRO-designed, 320-tonne PSLV XL rocket that has been a mainstay of the Indian space program, powering earlier launches to the Earth’s moon and Mars. The mission aims to shed light on the dynamics of several other solar phenomena by imaging and measuring particles in the sun’s upper atmosphere.
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