On Saturday, India is preparing to take an important additional step in the field of space exploration, with the launch of a probe aimed at studying the sun, a week after it succeeded in landing an unmanned vehicle at the south pole of the moon.
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft is scheduled to take off at 11:50 (06.20 GMT) on a journey that will last four months until it reaches its destination at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers. It will carry scientific equipment to study the outer layers of the sun.
This will be New Delhi's first vehicle to study the sun, bringing India to NASA and the European Space Agency in discovering the radiant star of the solar system.
"This is an ambitious mission for India," astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhuri told NDTV on Friday, noting that the vehicle intends to study coronal mass emission, a periodic phenomenon that leads to massive discharges of plasma and magnetic energy coming from the atmosphere. The atmosphere of the sun.
These discharges are usually so large that they reach the Earth and affect the operation of satellites. The spacecraft will help anticipate the occurrence of these phenomena and “warn everyone” in a way that allows preventive measures to be taken regarding the moons.
The vehicle will take off into space aboard a 320-ton PSLV XL rocket designed by the Indian Space Research Organization. This missile is one of the pillars of New Delhi's program, and has previously been used to launch missions towards the moon and Mars. The Indian space program was built on a relatively low budget, which was increased 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 existing technology and modifying it as necessary, thanks to the boom in skilled engineers who receive low salaries compared to their foreign counterparts.
Last week, India became the fourth country to succeed in landing an unmanned vehicle on the surface of the moon, after Russia, the United States, and China. The cost of "Chandrian-3" amounted to 74.6 million dollars, that is, less than many missions from other countries.
India is scheduled to launch a three-day manned mission into Earth's orbit next year. It intends to undertake 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.
0 Comments