India launches first spacecraft to the Sun just days after historic Moon landing

India successfully launched its first solar space mission on Saturday, just days after becoming the first country in history to achieve a soft landing of a spacecraft on the Moon’s uncharted south pole.

A spacecraft named Aditya (“Sun” in Sanskrit) was launched at 11.50am local time (7.20am BST) from the same space centre in Sriharikota in southern India where the country’s historic Chandrayaan-3 moon mission was launched in July.

Thousands of people gathered to witness the historic launch from a viewing platform at the centre, chanting slogans and cheering as the rocket left Earth with a blast of smoke and fire, setting off for one of the most ambitious missions yet from India’s space agency Isro.

A live stream hosted on YouTube by Isro was being watched by more than 800,000 people at its peak shortly after launch.

The mission aims to study solar winds and storms which can cause disturbances on Earth commonly seen as auroras as well as problems with human electronics.

The Aditya-L1 is designed to travel to a point 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth over the course of four months, stopping far short of the sun, which is 150 million km from Earth.

It will reach a location known as a Lagrange Point (in this case, L1), where it can maintain its position relative to the Sun and Earth due to being held in balance between the two celestial bodies’ gravitational fields. This will offer the Aditya craft an unobstructed and continuous view of the Sun while also reducing fuel consumption.

“We have made sure we will have a unique data set that is not currently available from any other mission,” said Sankar Subramanian, principal scientist of the Aditya-L1 mission.

“This will allow us to understand the sun, its dynamics as well as the inner heliosphere, which is an important element for current-day technology, as well as space-weather aspects,” he added.

The mission has the capacity to make a “big bang in terms of science,” said Somak Raychaudhury, who was involved in developing some components of the observatory craft, adding that energy particles emitted by the Sun can hit satellites that control communications on Earth.

“There have been episodes when major communications have gone down because a satellite has been hit by a big corona emission. Satellites in low earth orbit are the main focus of global private players, which makes the Aditya-L1 mission a very important project,” he said.

Scientists hope to learn more about the effect of solar radiation on the thousands of satellites in orbit, a number growing with the success of ventures like the Starlink communications network of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“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.

Longer term, data from the mission could help better understand the Sun’s impact on Earth’s climate patterns and the origins of solar wind, the stream of particles that flow from the sun through the solar system, Isro scientists have said.

India in recent years has privatised space launches and is looking to open the sector to foreign investment as it targets a five-fold increase in its share of the global launch market within the next decade.

As space turns into a global business, the country is also banking on the success of Isro to showcase its prowess in the sector.

The launch of the Aditya-L1 spacecraft took place barely a week after India beat Russia to become the first country to land on the south pole of the Moon. While Russia had a more powerful rocket and attempted its landing earlier, India‘s Chandrayaan-3 succeeded where the Luna-25 failed to execute a textbook soft landing.

Additional reporting by agencies