India's space agency launched a sun-study rocket on Saturday in the agency's first mission to explore space, a week after it successfully landed an unmanned vehicle at the moon's south pole.

The live broadcast on the website of the Indian Space Research Organization showed the rocket launching carrying the spacecraft, dubbed Aditya-L1 from an Indian word meaning sun, leaving smoke and fire as scientists clapped.

The broadcast was watched by more than 860,<> viewers, while thousands gathered in a showroom near the launch site to watch the rocket launch.

On its journey, Aditya-L1 is scheduled to travel 1.5 million kilometers and last 4 months until it reaches what looks like a parking lot in space.

The waiting areas are called "Lagrange points," where objects tend to stay in place due to the balance of gravitational forces, which reduces the spacecraft's fuel consumption.

Aditya-L1 started generating the power.
The solar panels are deployed.

The first EarthBound firing to raise the orbit is scheduled for September 3, 2023, around 11:45 hrs. IST pic.twitter.com/AObqoCUE8I

— ISRO (@isro) September 2, 2023

Ambitious goals

The launch of the spacecraft aims to study the outer layers of the sun and the solar wind that can cause disturbances on Earth that usually occur in the form of the aurora borealis.

Principal scientist on the mission Sankar Subramanian said they would have a unique dataset that is currently unavailable from any other mission, adding that this would allow understanding the nature and activity of the sun as well as the inner heliosphere, an important element of today's technology, as well as the features of space weather.

Astrophysicist Sumak Raishudhuri said on Friday that the mission illustrates India's ambition, noting that the spacecraft intends to study coronal mass emissions, a periodic phenomenon that leads to massive discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the sun's atmosphere.

These discharges are usually so massive as to reach Earth and affect the work of satellites.

Scientists from the Indian Space Research Organization said long-term data from the mission could help better understand the sun's influence on Earth's climate patterns and the origin of the solar wind, a stream of particles flowing from the sun through the solar system.

The spacecraft will also help predict these phenomena, allowing preventive action on the satellites to be taken.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking India's space missions to have a greater role on the world stage, which is dominated by the United States and China.

The spacecraft will take off into space aboard a 320-tonne PSLVXL rocket designed by the Indian Space Research Organization and previously used to take off missions to the moon and Mars.


low cost;

India's space programme was built on a relatively low budget, which was lifted after the failure of a first attempt to put a probe into orbit around the moon in 2008.

Experts say India is able to keep the costs of its space program low by copying and modifying existing technology as necessary, and thanks to engineers who are underpaid compared to their foreign counterparts.

Last week, India became the fourth country to successfully land an unmanned vehicle on the moon, after Russia, the United States and China, and the first country to land on the moon's south pole.

The cost of the lunar lander was $74.6 million, less than many other countries' missions.

In 2014, India became the first Asian country to put a probe into Mars orbit.

India is scheduled to launch a 3-day manned mission to Earth orbit by next year, and plans to launch a joint mission with Japan to send a second probe to the moon by 2025, and a mission to Venus' orbit in the next two years.