India is on a mission to study the sun.
The Aditya-L1 will be India’s first space observatory for solar research when it launches in September. It won’t land on the sun, clearly, but will instead travel 1.5 million kilometers in four months to study the sun’s atmosphere.
The mission is estimated to cost about $46 million. Scientists say that it could “help shed light on the origins of solar wind.”
One would hope that India’s space agency has also taken the lesson of Icarus who also tried to fly to the sun. It didn’t end well for him.