After the moon, India launches a rocket to study the sun

BENGALURU (Reuters) – Following the success of India’s moon landing, the country’s space agency launched a rocket to study the sun on Saturday in its first such solar mission.

The rocket left a trail of smoke and fire as scientists applauded, a live broadcast on the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) website showed.

India’s space agency on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, later said the satellite was already in orbit.

The broadcast was watched by more than 860,000 viewers, as thousands gathered in an observation gallery near the launch site to watch liftoff of the probe, which aims to study solar winds that can cause disturbances on Earth commonly seen as auroras. .

The Aditya-L1 spacecraft, named after the Hindi word for sun, blasted off just a week after India defeated Russia to become the first country to land on the planet’s south pole. moon. While Russia had a more powerful rocket, India’s Chandrayaan-3 outperformed Luna-25 to execute a manual landing.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing for India’s space missions to play a bigger role on a world stage dominated by the United States and China. Home Minister Amit Shah said on the X social media platform that the launch was a “giant step” towards Modi’s vision.

Aditya-L1 is designed to travel 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) over four months, far away from the Sun, which is 150 million kilometers from Earth. Your goal is to stop your journey at a kind of parking lot in space, called the Lagrange Point, where objects tend to stay put due to the balance of gravitational forces, thus reducing the spacecraft’s fuel consumption.

“We have ensured that we have a unique data set that is not currently available on any other mission,” said Sankar Subramanian, the mission’s principal scientist.

“This will allow us to understand the Sun, its dynamics and the inner heliosphere, which is an important element for current technology, as well as space weather aspects,” he added.

The mission also has the ability to cause a “big bang in scientific terms,” ​​said Somak Raychaudhury, who was involved in developing some of the observatory’s components, adding that the energy particles emitted by the sun can impact satellites that control communications. on earth.

“There have been episodes where major communications have been disrupted because a satellite has been hit by a large corona emission. Low-Earth orbit satellites are the main focus of global private players, making the Aditya-mission L1 a very important project”, he said.

Scientists hope to learn more about the effect of solar radiation on the thousands of orbiting satellites, a number that is growing with the success of ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink communications network.

“Low Earth orbit has been heavily contaminated due to private involvement, so understanding how to safeguard satellites there will be especially important in today’s space environment,” said Rama Rao Nidamanuri, head of the Indian Institute’s department of earth and space sciences. of Space Science and Technology.

In the long term, the mission data could help to better understand the sun’s impact on Earth’s weather patterns and the origins of the solar wind, the stream of particles that flows from the sun through the solar system, the scientists said. from ISRO.

Prompted by Modi, India has privatized space launches and is seeking to open up the sector to foreign investment, aiming to increase its share of the global launch market five-fold over the next decade.

As space becomes a global businessthe country also relies on the success of ISRO to show its prowess in the sector.

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