The Aditya-L1 mission is the first from an Asian nation to orbit the Sun. After a four-month journey through space, the probe arrives at its destination, where it will study the star's outer layers.
The probe was launched in September and took four months to reach the Sun's orbit. The solar observation mission launched by India reached its destination on January 6, 2024, after a four-month journey through space. Named after a Hindu deity, the Aditya-L1 probe will orbit the Sun to study its outermost layers.
The solar observatory is stationed at the so-called Lagrange point 1 (L1), where the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth cancel each other out, allowing it to remain in a stable orbit.
Celebrating yet another achievement for the Indian space program, the country's Minister of Science and Technology, Jitendra Singh, said that the probe's mission will be to uncover the mysteries of the connection between the Sun and the Earth.
The Aditya-L1 satellite was successfully launched in September 2023, ten days after India became the first nation in the world to land on the Moon's south pole. The solar mission, the first of its kind by the Indian space agency, is expected to record solar activity for five years. It will especially study coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon in which enormous discharges of plasma and magnetic energy occur from the Sun's atmosphere.
These explosions are so powerful that they can reach Earth and potentially disrupt the operations of satellites, communications systems, and power stations. Aditya-L1 could also act as an early warning system for solar storms, with a lead time of approximately one hour.
The probe weighs just over 1.4 tons. Although the Indian space agency has not disclosed the cost of the mission, the local press estimates that it cost around 48 million dollars.
With this, India joins the select group of countries that have launched missions to study the Sun. The American NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have already sent several probes to the center of the Solar System since the 1960s.
Japan and China have also launched solar observation missions, but these are located in Earth's orbit, not the Sun's. Aditya-L1 is therefore the first mission from an Asian nation to orbit the Sun.
India's comparatively low-budget space program has achieved several milestones in recent years, including becoming the first Asian nation to put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars in 2014.
Back in August 2023, an Indian probe made a historic landing on the unexplored south pole of the Moon. It is to this region that the United States intends to send the first female astronaut and the first Black astronaut in December 2025, in the new Artemis lunar program.
Driven by Prime Minister Modi, India has privatized space launches and is looking to open the sector to foreign investment, aiming to quintuple its share of the global launch market in the next decade.
