Fresh off its success on the moon, India is now headed for the sun.
The nation launched its first-ever solar observatory today (Sept. 2), sending the Aditya-L1 probe skyward atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 2:20 a.m. EDT (0620 GMT; 11:50 a.m. local India time).
The PSLV deployed Aditya-L1 into low Earth orbit (LEO) as planned about 63 minutes after liftoff, sparking applause and high fives in mission control.
“Congratulations, India, and congratulations, ISRO [the Indian Space Research Organisation],” Jitendra Singh, India’s Minister of State for Science and Technology, said shortly after deployment on ISRO’s launch webcast.
“While the entire world watched this with bated breath, it’s indeed a sunshine moment for India,” Singh added.
The successful launch followed on the heels of one other big milestone for India: On Aug. 23, its Chandrayaan-3 mission became the primary to land softly near the moon’s south pole.
Chandrayaan-3’s lander-rover duo are expected to conk out in per week or so, when the tough lunar night falls at their touchdown site. But Aditya-L1’s long journey has just begun.
Related: Facts in regards to the sun’s age, size and history
A protracted road to an excellent sun-viewing spot
Aditya-L1 won’t stay in LEO without end: After a series of checkouts, it should use its onboard propulsion system to move toward Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1 (L1), a gravitationally stable spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet within the direction of the sun.
That destination explains the latter a part of the mission’s name. And the primary part is easy enough: “Aditya” translates to “sun” in Sanskrit.
The three,260-pound (1,480 kilograms) observatory will arrive at L1 about 4 months from now, if all goes in response to plan. However the long trek shall be price it, in response to the ISRO.
“A satellite placed within the halo orbit across the L1 point has the most important advantage of repeatedly viewing the sun with none occultation/eclipses,” ISRO officials wrote in an Aditya-L1 mission description. “This may provide a greater advantage of observing the solar activities and its effect on space weather in real time.”
Indeed, one other sun-studying spacecraft is already at L1 — the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission that launched in December 1995. (Several other spacecraft, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, are at Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2, which is 1,000,000 miles from Earth, within the direction away from the sun.)
Solar flares, the coronal heating mystery and more
Once it’s settled in at L1, the solar probe will use 4 three science instruments to review the particles and magnetic fields in its immediate surroundings and 4 others to scrutinize the sun’s surface (referred to as the photosphere) and its atmosphere.
This work will help scientists higher understand solar activity, including the dynamics of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), ISRO officials say. Flares are powerful flashes of high-energy radiation, and CMEs are huge eruptions of solar plasma.
Each forms of outburst can affect us here on Earth. Intense CMEs that hit our planet, for instance, trigger geomagnetic storms that may disrupt satellite navigation and power grids. (As a side profit, such storms also supercharge the gorgeous light shows referred to as auroras.)
Aditya-L1 can even tackle the “coronal heating problem,” considered one of the largest mysteries in heliophysics. The corona — the sun’s wispy outer atmosphere — is incredibly hot, reaching temperatures around 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius), in response to NASA.
That is about 200 times hotter than the solar surface, which is “only” 10,000 degrees F (5,500 degrees C) or so. It’s still unclear what’s accountable for this startling and counterintuitive discrepancy. (Why wouldn’t it be hotter away from the sun’s core, where the energy-producing nuclear fusion reactions are occurring?)
Aditya-L1 has other science goals as well. As an illustration, the mission also goals to more fully flesh out the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing continually from the sun, ISRO officials said. Aditya-L1 will measure the composition of the solar wind and try to determine the way it is accelerated.
And Aditya-L1 will do all this work on the low cost: The mission’s price tag is about 3.8 billion rupees, or $46 million US at current exchange rates. That is in the identical ballpark as Chandrayaan-3; India’s first successful moon-landing mission costs about 6.15 billion rupees, or $74 million US.
For comparison, NASA’s most up-to-date big-ticket sun mission, the record-setting Parker Solar Probe, costs roughly $1.5 billion. This disparity shouldn’t be viewed as an indictment of NASA, nonetheless; labor costs are much higher in the USA than in India, amongst other differences between the 2 nations’ economies.