India launched its first space mission to study the Sun on Saturday, a launch that marks a new achievement for the Asian country's space program, which last week became the first nation to land on the moon's south pole.
The launch of the Aditya-L1 (Sun, in Sanskrit) probe with the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket took place at 11:50 am (6:20 am GMT) from the center of Sriharikota in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, as shown live during the countdown by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
The probe will orbit the Earth for 16 days, which it will use to gradually gain speed, before heading towards its final destination: the first Lagrange point (L1), a place between the Sun and the Earth separated by 1.5 million kilometers from our planet.
The mission will take about four months to reach that point, which is barely 1% of the distance that separates both celestial bodies, and which stands out for being gravitationally stable, since the attraction of the Sun and the Earth is in balance, facilitating observation of the star without being affected by eclipses or occultations.
From there, Aditya-L1 will study the outermost layers of the Sun, the photosphere, the chromosphere and the corona, through seven payloads that will employ electromagnetic and particle detectors and magnetic fields, reported ISRO.
These tools have the objective of "obtaining information that helps to understand the problems of coronal heating, coronal mass ejection, activities prior to solar flares and their characteristics, space weather dynamics, the study of particle propagation and fields in the interplanetary medium," the Indian space agency continued.
The mass of Aditya-L1 is 1480.7 kilograms and it is expected to remain in operation for about five years. Although ISRO has not reported the mission's budget, local media estimate it to be around Rs 4,000 million, equivalent to more than $48 million.
This launch comes ten days after the historic landing of an Indian probe on the unexplored south pole of the Moon, within the framework of the Chandrayaan-3 mission of ISRO, which made the Asian country the first nation to reach the southernmost area. of the satellite.
