India Embarks on First Solar Mission After Lunar Triumph

Following its recent success with a moon landing, India’s space agency launched its inaugural mission to study the sun on Saturday, September 2, 2023. The event was live-streamed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), capturing the rocket’s trail of smoke and the applause from scientists.

ISRO confirmed on social media that the satellite had successfully entered orbit. The live stream attracted an audience of over 860,000, while thousands more assembled near the launch site. The mission’s primary focus is to study solar winds, which are known to cause phenomena like Earth’s auroras.

The spacecraft, named Aditya-L1, took off just a week after India surpassed Russia by landing on the moon’s south pole. Despite Russia’s more powerful rocket, India’s Chandrayaan-3 executed a perfect landing.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing for a more significant Indian presence in the global space landscape, currently led by the U.S. and China. Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah stated on social media that the launch was a “giant step” toward Modi’s vision.

Designed to travel 1.5 million km over four months, Aditya-L1 will eventually halt at a Lagrange Point—a stable area in space where gravitational forces are balanced, thus saving fuel. “We have made sure we will have a unique data set that is not currently available from any other mission,” said Sankar Subramanian, the mission’s principal scientist.

The mission is also expected to make a “big bang in terms of science,” according to Somak Raychaudhury, who was involved in some components of the observatory. He emphasized the importance of the mission, stating that “satellites in low Earth orbit are the main focus of global private players, which makes the Aditya-L1 mission a very important project.”

Rama Rao Nidamanuri, head of the department of earth and space sciences at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, noted that “the low Earth orbit has been heavily polluted due to private participation, so understanding how to safeguard satellites there will have special importance in today’s space environment.”

Long-term, the mission aims to provide data that could shed light on the sun’s influence on Earth’s climate and the origins of solar wind. India is also opening its space sector to foreign investment, targeting a five-fold increase in its share of the global launch market within the next decade.