As the celebrations of their historic Moon landing last week continue, India is preparing to launch its first mission to study the Sun this weekend. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announced that it plans to launch the solar probe on Saturday, September 2 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center located on the island of Sriharikota on the Bay of Bengal coastline.
The mission will take about four months to reach its goal: Lagrangian point L1 of the Sun-Earth system is 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. This is an ideal location for sun observations.
The solar observatory, known as Aditya-L1, will be tasked with collecting data on different layers of the Sun’s upper atmosphere, such as the chromosphere and corona. This will also include the study of coronal mass ejections and explosions, as well as other space weather factors that may have an impact on Earth.
🚀PSLV-C57/🛰️Aditya-L1 Mission:
The launch of Aditya-L1,
the first space-based Indian observatory to study the Sun ☀️, is scheduled for
🗓️September 2, 2023, at
🕛11:50 Hrs. IST from Sriharikota.Citizens are invited to witness the launch from the Launch View Gallery at… pic.twitter.com/bjhM5mZNrx
— ISRO (@isro) August 28, 2023
Solar activity is also responsible for the beautiful aurora activity in the night sky, but it also has the potential to disrupt Earth’s much-needed telecommunications satellites; therefore the need to study this phenomenon is urgent. Beyond concerns about Earth, the mission aims to learn more about other stars elsewhere in the universe.
ISRO is a bit active right now. On August 23, the mission named Chandrayaan-3 reached the surface of the Moon, making India the fourth country to successfully soft land on the Moon, after the Soviet Union, the United States and China. This success also made them the first country to land on the South Pole of the Moon. Let’s not forget that India was the first Asian country to put a vehicle in orbit around Mars in 2014.
With each of these achievements, India has proven it has what it takes to be a serious space nation.
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