India’s Upcoming Space Mission After Achieving a Lunar Landing

India’s space agency has announced its next mission, following the triumph of the Chandrayaan-3 moon landing, which will focus on studying the sun.

Aditya-L1, India’s first space observatory for solar research, is preparing for launch at the country’s main spaceport, Sriharikota, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) told reporters at its satellite command center this week, as scientists and crew celebrated the success of the lunar mission.

“We plan to launch in the first week of September,” said ISRO Chairman S. Somanath.

WHAT DOES ADITYA-L1 DO?

Named after the Hindi word for sun, the spacecraft is India’s first solar probe in space. Its goal is to study the solar wind, which can cause disturbances on Earth and is commonly considered the “northern wind”.

In the longer term, the mission’s data can help to better understand the sun’s influence on Earth’s climate patterns.

Recently, researchers said the European Space Agency/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft had detected numerous jets of relatively small charged particles periodically ejected from the corona — the sun’s outer atmosphere — that could help shed light on the origin of the solar wind.

HOW FAR DOES IT TRAVEL?

Aboard India’s heavy launch vehicle, PSLV, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft will travel 1.5 million kilometers in about four months to study the sun’s atmosphere.

It heads to a kind of parking lot in space, where objects tend to stay in place due to the balancing of gravitational forces, reducing the spacecraft’s fuel consumption.

These locations are called Lagrange points, named after the Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange.

HOW MUCH DOES THE JOB COST?

In 2019, the government granted the Aditya-L1 mission an amount equivalent to about $46 million. ISRO has not given an official update on the cost.

India’s space agency has earned a reputation for world-beating cost competitiveness in space technology, which executives and planners expect will boost its now-privatized space industry.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission, which landed the spacecraft on the moon’s south pole, had a budget of about $75 million.