India’s Aditya-L1 spacecraft launched on Saturday to study the Sun evolved from an idea for a single-instrument satellite into a full-fledged solar observatory through exhortations over 12 years ago by a late space scientist active in his 80s.
The late professor U.R. Rao, a former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), played a key role in coaxing solar physicists in the country to expand their ambitions — reimagine a 110kg satellite into a seven-instrument 1,480kg spacecraft, Aditya-L1 project scientists said on Saturday.
“He told us: stop taking baby steps and think bigger,” said Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Aryabhatta Research Institute for Observational Sciences, an astronomical observatory in Nainital, who was among a group of scientists who first proposed a satellite for solar studies in 2006.
