admin India’s sun-tracking spacecraft has achieved a major milestone in its journey to escape “Earth’s sphere of influence”, the country’s space agency said, days after being disappointed by The lunar probe cannot wake up.
The Aditya-L1 mission, which began its four-month journey to the center of the solar system on September 2, carries instruments to observe the sun’s outermost layers.
“The spacecraft has escaped Earth’s sphere of influence,” the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said in a statement on Saturday.
Aditya, named after the Hindu sun god, has traveled 920,000 km (570,000 miles), just over half the total distance of the journey.
At this point, the two bodies’ gravity cancels each other out, allowing the mission to maintain a stable halo orbit around our nearest star.
“This is the second time in a row that ISRO has been able to send a spacecraft beyond Earth’s sphere of influence, the first being the Mars Orbiter mission,” the agency added.
In August, India became the first country to land a craft near the largely unexplored lunar south pole and only the fourth country to land on the Moon. The Pragyan rover surveyed the area around its landing site but powered down before the start of the moonlit night, which lasts about two weeks on Earth.
India had hoped to extend the mission by reactivating the solar-powered vehicle when daylight returned to the Moon’s surface, but so far it has been met with radio silence .
“It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t wake up because the rover did what it was supposed to do,” ISRO S chief said.Somanath said on Wednesday.
In 2014, India became the first Asian country to put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars and is expected to launch a three-day crewed mission to Earth orbit in next year.
The United States and the European Space Agency have sent many probes to the center of the solar system, starting with NASA’s Pioneer program in the 1960s.
Japan and China have both launched missions their own solar observation mission in Earth orbit.
But if successful, ISRO’s latest mission will be the first by an Asian country to be placed in orbit around the sun.
