After landing on the Moon, India wants to study the Sun – 08/28/2023 – Science

After becoming the fourth country to successfully land on the moon, the Indian space agency has announced that it will send a satellite to study the sun.

“The launch of Aditya-L1, India’s first space observatory to study the Sun, is scheduled for September 2,” announced ISRO on the social network X (formerly Twitter).

Aditya, which means sun in Hindi, will orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth at the Lagrange Point-1 (a place where orbits are stable by the interaction of gravitational forces from Earth and Moon) and will provide clear images. and continuous from the Sun.

“This will offer a greater advantage for observing solar activity and its effects on space weather in real time,” informed ISRO.

The mission will carry seven instruments to observe the outer layers of the star – the photosphere, chromosphere and corona – using electromagnetic field and particle detectors, among other tools.

One of the objectives is to study the elements that explain meteorology from space, among others to better understand the dynamics of the solar wind.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have already launched spacecraft into orbit to study the Sun, but this will be India’s first.

The landing of Chandrayann-3, which means moonship in Sanskrit, made the India become the fourth country to achieve such an operation, after the United States, Russia and China.

The country has a low-cost aerospace program compared to other powers, but it has grown exponentially since it sent its first spacecraft to orbit the Moon in 2008.

Experts ensure that they achieve these low costs by copying and adapting existing space technology and taking advantage of the abundance of highly skilled engineers who charge much less than their foreign counterparts.

In 2014, India became the first Asian nation to put a satellite into orbit around Mars, and next year it plans to launch a three-day manned mission into Earth orbit.