Shifting focus to its next space odyssey after successfully placing a lander on the moon’s uncharted South Pole, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Saturday said the country’s maiden solar mission — Aditya-L1 — will “possibly” be launched on September 2.
Aditya-L1 would be the first space-based Indian observatory to study the Sun.
Speaking to ANI barely minutes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to scientists at the ISRO’s Bengaluru headquarters, Nilesh M Desai, a top space scientist at the agency and the director of Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, said, “We had planned the ‘Aditya-L1’ mission to study the sun. The mission is ready for launch. There is a possibility that the spacecraft will be launched on September 2.”
