The Aditya-L1 took off around midday local time in an operation broadcast live on television, attended by hundreds of spectators who cheered as the vehicle’s carrier rocket took off.
“The launch is successful,” said an official at the Indian Space Research Organization, stressing that everything is going well as the rocket proceeds towards the upper layers of the earth.
This will be the first vehicle for New Delhi to study the sun, so that India will join the US Space Agency “NASA” and the European Space Agency in discovering the radiating star of the solar system.
Japan and China have also launched missions to observe the sun from Earth’s orbit.
But if successful, the Indian mission will be the first Asian mission to reach orbit around the sun.
“This is an ambitious mission for India,” astrophysicist Somak Raishudhuri told NDTV on Friday, noting that the spacecraft intends to study coronal mass emission, a periodic phenomenon that leads to massive discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the sun’s atmosphere.
“It will also help us understand why these things happen, and in the future, we may have to create a warning system” in space, he added.
These discharges are usually huge enough to reach the ground and affect the work of satellites.
The vehicle will help to anticipate the occurrence of these phenomena and “warn everyone” in a way that allows taking preventive measures regarding the satellites.
The vehicle took off into space on board the “PSL VXL” rocket, weighing 320 tons, and was designed by the Indian Space Research Organization. This missile is one of the pillars of the New Delhi program, and it has previously been used to launch missions to the moon and Mars.
The journey is scheduled to last four months until the vehicle reaches its destination at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers, noting that this distance does not exceed one percent of the distance between the Earth and the sun.
It carries scientific equipment to study the outer layers of the sun.
The Indian space program was built on a relatively low budget, raised after the failure of a first attempt to put a probe into orbit around the moon in 2008.
Experts believe that India is able to keep the costs of its space program low by copying and modifying existing technology as necessary, and thanks to a boom in skilled engineers who receive lower salaries than their foreign counterparts.
Last week, India became the fourth country to succeed in landing an unmanned vehicle on the moon, after Russia, the United States and China. Chandrayaan-3 cost $74.6 million, less than many other countries’ missions.
In 2014, India became the first Asian country to put a probe into Mars orbit.
India is scheduled to launch a three-day manned mission into Earth orbit by next year. It plans to run a joint mission with Japan to send a second probe to the moon by 2025, and a mission to the orbit of Venus within the next two years.
