India’s space agency takes aim at another milestone on Saturday (Sep 2) with the launch of a probe to study the Sun, a week after its successful unmanned landing on the Moon.
Aditya-L1 will carry scientific instruments to observe the Sun’s outermost layers, blasting off at 11.50am (2.20pm Singapore time) for its four-month journey.
The United States and the European Space Agency (ESA) have sent numerous probes to the centre of the solar system, beginning with NASA’s Pioneer programme in the 1960s.
But if successful, the latest mission from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will be the first by any Asian nation to be placed in solar orbit.
“It’s a challenging mission for India,” astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told broadcaster NDTV on Friday.
Raychaudhury said the mission probe would study coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that sees huge discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun’s atmosphere.
These bursts are so powerful they can reach the Earth and potentially disrupt the operations of satellites.
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 km to reach its destination.
It 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.