India launched its first space mission to study the Sun on Saturday, nearly a week after becoming the first country to land an unmanned robotic spacecraft near the Moon's south pole. The Aditya-L1 spacecraft, the latest mission of India's ambitious space program, lifted off around noon local time from the launch pad in Sriharikota, southern India, to embark on a journey of observation of the outer atmosphere of the sun.
The launch was successful, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced shortly after. “The vehicle placed the satellite precisely in the intended orbit. India’s first solar observatory has started its journey towards the Sun-Earth point L1 destination,” ISRO said on Saturday.
The name of the mission is a Sanskrit word meaning sun. L1 stands for Lagrange point 1, referring to the location in space between the Sun and Earth where the satellite is heading and where the gravitational forces of the two bodies are in balance, according to ISRO.
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“This allows an object placed there to remain relatively stable in relation to the two celestial bodies,” we specify.
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft will orbit the Earth several times before traveling to its destination. It will take the satellite almost four months to reach this point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
The satellite will spend its entire mission in orbit around this location, where it will have an uninterrupted view of the sun, the space agency said.
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It carries seven payloads to study the solar corona, the outermost part of its atmosphere, as well as the photosphere – the surface of the sun, or what we see from Earth – and the chromosphere, a thin layer of plasma between the photosphere and corona. .The launch follows the August landing of the Chandrayaan-3 mission on the Moon, which marked a success for India's growing space aspirations and won applause in the country of more than a billion. of inhabitants.
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