India sends next space mission to the Sun after successful Moon landing

The Indian Aditya-L1 blasted off Saturday on a mission to the Sun, the next step in India’s space ambitions after a successful landing on the Moon’s south pole.

"Launch successful, all normal," an Indian Space Research Organisation official announced from mission control, as the vessel made its way to the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere.

The spacecraft carries with it scientific instruments to observe the Sun's outermost layers in a four-month journey, an Indian astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told the local broadcaster NDTV that it was “a challenging mission for India.”

Raychaudhury described the mission as a study of coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon that sees huge discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun's atmosphere, so powerful they can reach the Earth and potentially disrupt satellites.

The Indian research vessel will study and help predict the phenomenon, in order to “alert everybody so that satellites can shut down their power,” Raychaudhury explained, "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 930,000 miles to reach its destination, only one percent of the vast distance between Earth and the Sun. Once there, the gravitational forces of both celestial bodies cancel each other out, allowing the Indian mission to remain in a stable halo orbit.

The mission will also study the dynamics of other solar phenomena through imaging and measuring particles in the Sun's upper atmosphere. If successful, it will also be the first by any Asian nation to be placed in orbit around the Sun. Whereas Japan and China launched solar observatory missions into Earth's orbit.