India’s Chandrayaan-3 unmanned spacecraft had recently completed its 1,000-kilometer journey and landed on the less-explored south pole of the Moon. India thus became the fourth country to achieve a “soft landing” on the Moon, after the United States, the Soviet Union and China, and the first to land on the Moon’s little-explored south pole.
India’s space agency ISRO is preparing to launch a new satellite called Aditya-L1 to study the Sun this week, days after successfully landing a spacecraft on the Moon as part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
DAY SCHEDULED FOR LAUNCH SEPTEMBER 2
ISRO shared on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, “Aditya-L1, the first space-based Indian observatory to study the Sun, is scheduled to launch on September 2”.
According to the Independent’s report, the take-off is planned to be made by ISRO’s PSLV XL rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, which is India’s main space base.
With Aditya meaning “Sun” in Hindi, ISRO hopes to observe the activities of the closest star to Earth from space for the first time, and its effect on space weather events such as solar storms in real time.
The Indian space agency aims to place the spacecraft in a halo orbit at a region known as Lagrange Point 1 (L1), about 1.5 million km from Earth, to obtain a continuous and clear view of the Sun.