India

India Launches First Solar Mission Days After Historic Moon Landing

SEP 3 2023·Updated FEB 8 2024

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Image credit: Indian Space Research Organization

The Facts

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on Saturday launched its first solar mission — the indigenously developed Aditya-L1 — carrying seven scientific payloads to systematically observe the outer layers of the sun and study solar winds.
Al Jazeera
On Sunday, India's space agency announced that the satellite was in a good condition and "operating nominally" after successfully performing its first Earth-bound maneuver to attain a new orbit of 245 km by 22,459 km. The second maneuver is scheduled for Sept. 5, at around 3AM.
The Times of India
The Aditya-L1 will travel 1.5M km (930,000 miles) — only one percent of the distance between the Earth and sun — over four months to reach a Lagrange Point, where fuel consumption for the spacecraft will be reduced to balance gravitational forces.
Daily Mail
Scientists hope that data collected in real time with an uninterrupted view of the sun will provide India with a better understanding of heliophysics, while also adding to the global knowledge of potential disturbances in space weather that are related to the star's energy.
nytimes
This launch comes less than two weeks after India successfully landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the lunar surface, becoming the fourth nation in the world ever to land a vehicle on the moon and the second to do so in the 21st century.
CNN
Last Tuesday, the ISRO confirmed that the Chandrayan-3 Rover had detected sulfur, aluminum, iron, calcium, chromium, titanium, manganese, oxygen, and silicon near the south lunar pole, as it looks for signs of frozen water that could help future astronauts over its 14-day mission.
CBS News

Sources Split

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The Spin

Narrative A

These latest successful developments are strong indications that India is on its way to overtake Russia as a space power, especially after the Luna-25 mission became yet another Russian exploration mission to end in failure. Its rising space program is now set to compete with the US and China to produce space technology, representing — along with Beijing — advancement in the global south.

Quartz

Narrative B

These achievements indeed indicate that India's space industry can produce advanced systems at a reasonable cost, but that alone will not make the country an advanced industrial nation, as has been touted by the government. If India really wants to become an industrial power, then it must reduce tariffs and non-tariff barriers, as well as develop its transport infrastructure.

Barrons