Just over a week after setting a lunar milestone, India has upped its space game with the launch of Aditya-L1, its maiden mission to explore the Sun. Launched from Sriharikota on the east coast, the mission was declared a success by ISRO, India’s space agency.
The spacecraft is on a four-month journey to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L1), covering a distance of 1.5 million km. There, the spacecraft will settle into a halo orbit, an advantageous location for uninterrupted solar observation, thanks to a balance of gravitational forces.
Equipped with an array of seven instruments, Aditya-L1 aims to dissect the various layers of the Sun, from its innermost core to its outer corona. The specialist team will examine phenomena such as solar winds, which have known effects on the Earth’s atmosphere.
The mission is expected to provide an influx of real-time data that could be crucial to understanding the Sun’s influence on Earth’s climate. Scientists around the world will receive a continuous stream of images from the craft, about one image per minute, for detailed study.
As India’s first effort to study our solar system’s star, the mission comes on the heels of the nation’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, which marked India as the first country to land on the Moon’s south pole . Recent achievements in space exploration have won international recognition from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who highlighted the “triumph of all mankind”. These achievements set the stage for the upcoming G20 summit in New Delhi, giving Modi an opportunity to highlight India’s frugal but impactful contributions to global space exploration.
This article is sourced from and written by AI.
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