India emerges as a space power
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft, named after the Sun in Hindi, lifted off just a week after India defeated Russia and became the first country to land on the moon’s south pole. Although Russia had a more powerful rocket, the Indian Chandrayaan-3 outperformed the Luna-25 to execute a manual moon landing.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing for Indian space missions to play a bigger role on a world stage dominated by the United States and China.
“He wants to recreate India’s IT boom with space,” said a government official who asked not to be quoted because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of Modi’s office.
Sankar Subramanian, the mission’s principal scientist, said that “we have ensured that we will have a unique data set that is not currently available on any other mission. This will allow us to understand the Sun, its dynamics, as well as the inner heliosphere, which is an important element for current technology, in addition to the aspects related to space weather”.
Aditya-L1 is designed to travel 1.5 million kilometers in four months, very far from the Sun, which is 150 million km from Earth. It is scheduled to stop its journey at a kind of parking lot in space, called the Lagrange point, where objects tend to stay still due to the balance of gravitational forces, which reduces the spacecraft’s fuel consumption.