Hot on the heels of its lunar landing success, India is readying to blast a probe even deeper into space to study the sun.
The country’s first solar observation mission, named Aditya-L1, is set to be launched from India’s main spaceport on Sriharikota, an island off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, at 11:50 a.m. on Saturday. The spacecraft is scheduled to spend 125 days traveling 1.5 million kilometers to its destination, a point in space where objects stay put and consume less fuel.
While arriving there would be an impressive achievement for ISRO, the Indian space agency, Aditya-L1 would have gone just a fraction of the 150 million km between Earth and the sun.