Aditya will 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, the name of the Hindu Sun deity, will travel 1.5 million kilometres to reach its destination – still only 1 per cent 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 halo orbit around our nearest star.
Aditya is travelling on the ISRO-designed, 320-tonne PSLV XL rocket that has been a mainstay of the Indian space programme, powering earlier launches to the Moon and Mars.
The mission also aims to shed light on the dynamics of several other solar phenomena by imaging and measuring particles in the Sun’s upper atmosphere.