India's Aditya-L1 solar probe launches

India launched its maiden expedition to observe the sun called Aditya-L1 on Saturday.

Following the success of India's moon landing with Chandrayaan-3 this is the country's next attempt at another space milestone.

Aditya L-1 launched at 11:50 a.m local time (0620 UTC/GMT). The crowd at the viewer's gallery and within the office of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota district of the Southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, erupted in celebration. 

As the phases of the launch proceeded as planned, the ISRO said the probe had deployed the solar panels that will provide it with power long-term and that they had started functioning. 

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the space agency on social media and said the country's "space journey" continued after its recent successful lunar mission. 

"Our tireless scientific efforts will continue in order to develop better understanding of the Universe for the welfare of entire humanity," Modi said. 

"Congratulations India and congratulations ISRO. While the whole watched this with baited breath it is indeed a sun shine moment for India" said Jitendra Singh the Minister of State in the Department of Space.

A jubilant launch

With the success of the launch, Dr. Shankar Subramaniam the principal scientist of the mission announced that "now ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) has established that it has the capability to send observatory class missions anywhere in the interplanetary medium." 

Aditya-L1 is carrying scientific instruments to observe the Sun's outermost layers and aims to study behavior.

Dipankar Banerjee, director at the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) said that "we're proud to be Indian...the entire country is excited that we got this opportunity now to travel towards the sun."

Around an hour and a half after the launch, the Aditya-L1 satellite successfully separated from the rocket that had carried it into orbit, PSLV-C57. 

"PSLV-C57 had injected Aditya L-1 satellite into the desired intermediate orbit. PSLV-C57 Aditya-L1 mission is accomplished" said the mission director. 

Aditya-L1 could make a 'big bang' for science

The mission is named after the Hindi word for "sun." 

The spacecraft is set to travel about 1.5 million kilometers for over four months towards a so-called Lagrange Point in space.

Objects tend to stay put in this space because of the balancing act of gravitational focus which also aids to reduce fuel consumption of the spacecraft.

"India has a long tradition of looking at the sun from the ground...but there are limitations of looking at the sun from the ground because you can only see the lower atmosphere of the sun. So this was very, very important that we could go to the space," said Dipankar Banerjee director of ARIES.

"It is multi-wavelength, multi-instrument and multi-direction and it measures particle, field and radiation. So you don't have such kind of satellites existing at the L1 point so far or currently. That makes Aditya-L1 absolutely unique," said Anil Bharadwaj, director of Physical Research Laboratory, a unit of the Department of Space of Government.

Somak Raychaudhury who was involved in the development of certain parts of the mission's observatory said that Aditya-L1 had the capacity to make a "big bang in terms of science."

Last month, India beat Russia into becoming the first country to land an unmanned vessel on the south pole of the moon. 

Aditya-L1 to focus on several types of solar behaviors

Raychaudhury told broadcaster NDTV that one of the main things the probe will study are coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon which sees massive discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun's atmosphere.

Some of these bursts are powerful enough to reach the Earth and disrupt satellites.

Aditya-L1 will help predict this phenomenon and "alert everybody so that satellites can shut down their power," he said.

 

"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," said Rama Rao Nidamanuri, head of the department of earth and space sciences at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.

In the long run, data from the mission could help better understand the sun's impact on earth's climate patterns, the origins of solar wind, the stream of particles that flow from the sun through the solar system, said scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

India's consistent rise in space work

Beginning with NASA's pioneer programme in 1960's, previously, the US and European Space Agency (ESA) have sent numerous probes to the center of the solar system.

India has recently privatized space launches and is looking to open the sector to foreign investment. It targets a five-fold increase in its share in the global launch market within the next decade.

The country has been steadily matching the achievements of established spacefaring powers at a much lesser cost. Experts believe that the country is able to keep costs low by copying and adapting existing technology and due to the highly skilled engineers who typically earn a fraction of their foreign counterparts' salaries.

ns/msh (Reuters, AFP)