Aditya-L1 mission: India seeks to top its moon landing with spacecraft to study sun
- India’s solar observation probe Aditya-L1 is scheduled to launch on Saturday
- The United States and China are among a small group of nations with solar missions
Hot on the heels of its lunar landing success, India is readying to blast a probe even deeper into space to study the sun.
The country’s first solar observation mission, named Aditya-L1, is set to be launched from India’s main spaceport on Sriharikota, an island off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, at 11.50am local time on Saturday.
The spacecraft is scheduled to spend 125 days travelling 1.5 million km (932,000 miles) to its destination, a point in space where objects stay put and consume less fuel.
While arriving there would be an impressive achievement for ISRO, the Indian space agency, Aditya-L1 would have gone just a fraction of the 150 million km between Earth and the sun.
For ISRO, success would be another major feat after India became the first country to land a spacecraft close to the lunar south pole in August.