Goemkarponn Desk
Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh: Following up on the success of India’s moon landing with the Chandrayaan-3, ISRO today launched Aditya-L1 mission to study the sun.
India’s first solar probe aims to study solar winds, which can cause disturbance on earth commonly seen as auroras.
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.
Named after the Hindi word for the Sun, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft is designed to travel about 1.5 million km 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.
As the 23.40-hour countdown concluded, the 44.4 metre-tall Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) soared majestically at the prefixed time from the spaceport, located on the Eastern coast about 135 km from Chennai. It will be PSLV’s “longest flight” for about 63 minutes.
Among others, it will send pictures of the sun for scientific experiments. According to scientists, there are five Lagrangian points (or parking areas) between the Earth and the Sun where a small object tends to stay if put there.
The Lagrange Points are named after Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange for his prize-winning paper — “Essai sur le Problème des Trois Corps, 1772.”
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