Aditya-L1: Which other countries have launched solar missions?

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is set to launch India’s first solar mission, Aditya-L1, today, September 2. Aditya-L1 spacecraft will make a 125-day journey to the Lagrange point L-1 between the Earth and the Sun, which is 1.5 million kilometres from the planet. The Aditya-L1 mission launch will take place at 11:50 AM at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

The objectives of the mission are to study the real-time effects of the Sun on space weather.

India is not the only country to venture into solar exploration endeavours. Other space agencies have initiated such missions as well in the past.

Take a look at other countries which have already launched spacecrafts to study the Sun.

Japan: The country decided to launch a space mission in 1981 for the study of solar flares. Japan’s space agency JAXA’s first solar observation satellite was named Hinotori (ASTRO-A). The country has since put out multiple solar exploratory missions- the Yohkoh (SOLAR-A) in 1991, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) NASA and ESA in 1995, Transient Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) with NASA in 1998 and Hinode (SOLAR-B) in 2006.

United States: US space agency NASA has been at the forefront of space exploration and the situation is no different with respect to solar missions. NASA launched the SOHO mission in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and JAXA in 1995. It later managed the Advanced Composition Explorer in August 1997, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory in 2006, the Solar Dynamics Observatory in 2010, and the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) in 2013.

NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe in 2018. Three years after its take off, it became the first spacecraft to ‘touch’ the Sun. The objective of the Parker Solar Probe was to study solar coronas.

Europe: The European Space Agency has launched multiple solar missions in collaboration with NASA and JAXA. The ESA managed the Ulysses mission in 1990, which was tasked with the study of the environment above and below the poles of the Sun, Apart from that, the space agency was responsible for the Project for On-Board Autonomy-2 (Proba-2) mission in 2001, which had two experiments onboard for solar observations.

The ESA will launch the Proba-3 and Smile in 2024 and 2025 for solar exploration.

China: The National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), launched the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) in October 2022. Nicknamed Kuafu-1, the spacecraft will study how the Sun’s magnetic field leads to coronal mass ejections and other eruptions.