after the success of selenization in the region of the south pole of the MoonIndia’s space agency launched a solar probe on Saturday as part of its first solar mission of its kind, Reuters and AFP reported.
The rocket left a trail of smoke and fire as scientists cheered, a live stream on the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) website showed.
India’s space agency later tweeted on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that the satellite was now in orbit.
The Aditya-L1 probe, named after the Hindu word for Sun, was launched at 11:50 a.m. local time (06:20 GMT) from the country’s main space center in Sriharikota.
“The launch was successful, everything is going well,” an official representative of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced from the mission control center while the spacecraft headed for the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, reports Agerpres.
The mission has scientific instruments to observe the outer layers of the Sun during the four-month journey.
The United States and the European Space Agency (ESA) have already launched spacecraft to study the Sun, starting with NASA’s Pioneer program in the 1960s, but this will be a first for India.
Both Japan and China have launched their own missions to observe the Sun from Earth orbit.
First for India
However, if successful, ISRO’s latest mission will be the first to be launched by an Asian country into solar orbit.
“This is an ambitious mission for India,” astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhuri told NDTV on Friday.
Raychaudhuri said the probe will study coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that involves huge ejections of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun’s atmosphere. They are so powerful that they can reach the Earth and disrupt the functioning of satellites.
Aditya will help predict these phenomena “and warn everyone so the satellites can turn off their power,” the astrophysicist added.
To reach its destination, Aditya will travel 1.5 million kilometers, which is still only one percent of the enormous distance between the Earth and the Sun.
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Source: Hot News
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