India launches ambitious mission to study the sun

NEW DELHI, Sept 2 (Bernama) -- India's space agency on Saturday launched the Aditya-L1 spacecraft, carrying the nation's ambition to study the sun. The 1,480.7-kg Aditya-L1 will stay approximately 1.5 million km away from the earth, directed towards the sun, which is about one per cent of the earth-sun distance, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said. It lifted off on a rocket from the launch centre on Sriharikota island off the country's southeastern coast. "The sun is a giant sphere of gas and Aditya-L1 will study the outer atmosphere of the sun," the space agency said, duly clarifying that the spacecraft will neither land on the sun nor approach it any closer. The word “Aditya” means the sun in the Hindi language. ISRO's first solar mission comes days after India became the fourth country to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon's surface after Russia, the United States and China. The space agency said it will study solar activities and the sun's effect on space weather. After travelling for 125 days, the spacecraft, carrying seven payloads, is expected to be put in a halo orbit around the "Lagrangian point L1". That point is considered closest to the sun and where the spacecraft is expected to hover longer because of balancing gravitational forces and less fuel consumption. Lagrange points, named in honour of Italian-French mathematician Josephy-Louis Lagrange, are positions in space where objects tend to stay put as "the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them", according to the US space agency NASA's website. -- BERNAMA