India launches first mission after its historic moon landing | cnn

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India launched its first spacecraft dedicated to studying the sun, building on a month of historic successes for the country’s civilian space efforts.

The spacecraft, named Aditya-L1, launched from Sriharikota, an island off the Bay of Bengal, at 11:50 a.m. Saturday local time (2:20 a.m. ET). And it’s headed for an orbiting parking spot about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.

The successful liftoff of Aditya-L1 comes less than two weeks after India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organization, made history by landing its Chandrayaan-3 spaceship on the lunar surface. The achievement made India the only country fourth nation in the world (and second in the 21st century) to land a vehicle safely on the Moon.

That mission is expected to conclude next week.

Meanwhile, Aditya-L1 is heading to its destination at Lagrange point 1, an area between the Sun and Earth where the gravitational attraction of both celestial objects cancels each other out. That location will allow Aditya-L1 to remain in orbit, in an optimal position to observe the activities of the sun, with lower fuel consumption.

This position “will provide a greater advantage to observe solar activity and its effect on space weather in real time,” according to the space agency.

The spacecraft is equipped with seven scientific instruments, four of which will point directly at the Sun, while the others will study particles in the solar wind and magnetic fields passing through the 1 Lagrange point.

The main objectives of the mission include studying the upper atmosphere of the Sun and various solar phenomena, such as coronal mass ejections, or massive expulsions of plasma from the outermost layer of the Sun.

Information gleaned from the Aditya-L1 experiments will provide a clearer picture of space weather, or the term used to describe magnetic waves that propagate through our solar system. Space storms can have an impact on Earth when they reach our atmosphere, occasionally affecting satellites, radio communications and even power grids, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

India’s Aditya-L1 will complement information collected on other missions designed to study the sun, including NASA’s ongoing mission. Parker sun probe which in 2021 became the first spacecraft to “touch” the sun.

India’s first dedicated solar mission reinforces the country’s status as an emerging space superpower.