India has launched a rocket at the Sun hot on the heels of its successful unmanned Moon landing.

Aditya-L1 was launched on a ISRO-designed, 320-tonne PSLV XL rocket on Saturday, September 2, with the brief of studying the Sun.

A live broadcast of the launch saw onlookers cheering wildly as the huge craft lifted off.

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Announcing from mission control, an Indian Space Research Organisation staffer can be heard announcing: “Launch successful, all normal.”

The four-month journey will see the craft sample the outermost layers of the Sun using scientific instruments stowed away onboard.

It won’t be the first time a probe has been sent to space, with a long history of missions there having been sent out by The US and the European Space Agency.

The first was the 1960s NASA Pioneer programme.

Solar observatory missions have also been launched into Earth’s orbit by Japan and China.

What sets India’s new mission apart, however, is that if it succeeds with will be the first from an Asian country to be in orbit around the Sun.

Speaking on Friday, astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury told broadcaster NDTV: “It’s a challenging mission for India”.

The mission will try and look at the Sun’s coronal mass ejections, which is when plasma and magnetic energy fire off the surface of the star which have the capacity to impact the operation of satellites.

He added that Aditya would help to “alert everybody so that satellites can shut down their power”.

“It will also help us understand how these things happen, and in the future, we might not need a warning system out there,” he said.

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