The Sun after the Moon: India Sends 2nd Space Mission

By Staff, Agencies

The Indian Aditya-L1 blasted off Saturday on a mission to the Sun, the next step in India’s space ambitions after a successful landing on the Moon’s south pole.

“Launch successful, all normal,” an Indian Space Research Organisation official announced from mission control, as the vessel made its way to the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere.

The spacecraft carries with it scientific instruments to observe the Sun's outermost layers in a four-month journey, an Indian astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told the local broadcaster NDTV that it was “a challenging mission for India.”

Raychaudhury described the mission as a study of coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that sees huge discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun's atmosphere, so powerful they can reach the Earth and potentially disrupt satellites.

The Indian research vessel will study and help predict the phenomenon, in order to “alert everybody so that satellites can shut down their power,” Raychaudhury explained, "it will also help us understand how these things happen, and in the future, we might not need a warning system out there."