Bengaluru. Following the success of the Indian moon landing, the country’s space agency launched a rocket on Saturday to study the Sun in its first mission of its kind.
The rocket left a trail of smoke and fire as scientists applauded, a live broadcast on the website of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) showed.
The broadcast was followed by more than 860,000 people, while thousands more gathered in an observation gallery near the launch site to witness the takeoff of the probe, whose objective will be to study the solar winds, which can cause disturbances on Earth. commonly seen as auroras.
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft, named after the Sun in Hindi, lifted off just a week after India defeated Russia and became the first country to land on the moon’s south pole. Although Russia had a more powerful rocket, the Indian Chandrayaan-3 outperformed the Luna-25 to execute a manual moon landing.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing for Indian space missions to play a bigger role on a world stage dominated by the United States and China.
“He wants to recreate India’s IT boom with space,” said a government official who asked not to be quoted because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of Modi’s office.
Sankar Subramanian, the mission’s principal scientist, said that “we have ensured that we will have a unique data set that is not currently available on any other mission. This will allow us to understand the Sun, its dynamics, as well as the inner heliosphere, which is an important element for current technology, in addition to the aspects related to space weather”.
Aditya-L1 is designed to travel 1.5 million kilometers in four months, very far from the Sun, which is 150 million kilometers from Earth. It is scheduled to stop its journey at a kind of parking lot in space, called the Lagrange point, where objects tend to stay still due to the balance of gravitational forces, which reduces the spacecraft’s fuel consumption.
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