From the Moon to the Sun: India launches next space mission

SRIHARIKOTA, India, Sept 2 (AFP): The latest mission in India's ambitious space programme blasted off Saturday on a voyage towards the centre of the solar system, a week after the country's successful unmanned Moon landing.
Aditya-L1 launched shortly before midday, with a live broadcast showing hundreds of spectators cheering wildly against the deafening noise of the rocket's ascent.
"Congratulations to our scientists and engineers," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
"Our tireless scientific efforts will continue in order to develop better understanding of the Universe."
The mission is carrying scientific instruments to observe the Sun's outermost layers in a four-month journey.
The United States and the European Space Agency (ESA) have sent numerous probes to the centre of the solar system, beginning with NASA's Pioneer programme in the 1960s.
Japan and China have both launched their own solar observatory missions into Earth's orbit.
But if successful, the latest mission from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will be the first by any Asian nation to be placed in orbit around the Sun.
"It's a challenging mission for India," astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told broadcaster NDTV on Friday.
Raychaudhury said the mission probe would study coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that sees huge discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun's atmosphere.
These bursts are so powerful they can reach the Earth and potentially disrupt the operations of satellites.
Aditya will help predict the phenomenon "and alert everybody so that satellites can shut down their power", he said.
"It will also help us understand how these things happen, and in the future, we might not need a warning system out there."
Aditya, the name of the Hindu Sun deity, will travel 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) to reach its destination -- still only one percent of the vast distance between Earth and the Sun.