India has launched a rocket to study the sun, a week after the country’s historic landing on Moon’s South Pole, reports said.
Aditya-L1, carrying scientific instruments to observe the sun’s outermost layers, kicked off at 11:50 am (06:20 GMT) on Saturday for its four-month journey.
It aims to shed light on the dynamics of several solar phenomena by imaging and measuring particles in the sun’s upper atmosphere.
“It’s a challenging mission for India,” astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told NDTV on Friday.
Raychaudhury said the mission probe would study coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that sees huge discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the sun’s atmosphere.
Aditya-L1 will be equipped with seven distinct payloads, each geared towards capturing insights into the photosphere, chromosphere, and the Sun's outermost layers, also known as the corona.
While a first attempt for India, other countries have successfully placed orbiters to study the sun. NASA's Parker Solar Probe in 2021 which was sent to the sun's corona to sample particles and magnetic fields, as well as the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter which was launched the year before.