After the moon, India sets sights on studying the sun with rocket mission

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By Nivedita Bhattacharjee

BENGALURU (Reuters) — Following up on the success of India's moon landing with the Chandrayaan-3, the country's space agency was set to launch a rocket on Saturday to study the sun.

India's first space-based solar probe aims to study solar winds, which can cause disturbance on earth commonly seen as auroras.

Named after the Hindi word for the sun, the Aditya-L1 is set to blast off at 11:50 a.m. (0620 GMT).

The solar mission follows India beating Russia late last month to become the first country to land on the south pole of the moon. While Russia had a more powerful rocket, India's Chandrayaan-3 out-endured the Luna-25 to execute a textbook landing.

The Aditya-L1 spacecraft is designed to travel about 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) over four months to a kind of parking lot in space where objects tend to stay put because of balancing gravitational forces, reducing fuel consumption for the spacecraft.

Those positions are called Lagrange Points, named after Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange.

The mission has the capacity to make a «big bang in terms of science,» said Somak Raychaudhury, who was involved in the development of some components of the observatory, adding that energy particles emitted by the sun can hit satellites that control communications on earth.

«There have been episodes when major communications have gone down because a satellite has been hit by a big corona emission. Satellites in low earth orbit are the main focus of global private players, which makes the Aditya L1 mission a very important project,» he said.

Scientists hope to learn more about the effect of solar radiation on the thousands of satellites in orbit, a number growing with the success of