The rocket left a trail of smoke and fire as scientists clapped, a live broadcast on the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) website showed.

The broadcast was watched by nearly 500,000 viewers, while thousands gathered at a viewing gallery near the launch site to see the lift-off of the probe, which will aim to study solar winds, which can cause disturbance on earth commonly seen as auroras.

Named after the Hindi word for the sun, the Aditya-L1 launch follows India beating Russia late last month to become the first country to land on the south pole of the moon. While Russia had a more powerful rocket, India’s Chandrayaan-3 out-endured the Luna-25 to execute a textbook landing.

The Aditya-L1 spacecraft is designed to travel about 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) over four months to a kind of parking lot in space where objects tend to stay put because of balancing gravitational forces, reducing fuel consumption for the spacecraft.

Those positions are called Lagrange Points, named after Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange.

The mission has the capacity to make a “big bang in terms of science,” said Somak Raychaudhury, who was involved in the development of some components of the observatory, adding that energy particles emitted by the sun can hit satellites that control communications on earth.

“There have been episodes when major communications have gone down because a satellite has been hit by a big corona emission. Satellites in low earth orbit are the main focus of global private players, which makes the Aditya L1 mission a very important project,” he said.

Scientists hope to learn more about the effect of solar radiation on the thousands of satellites in orbit, a number growing with the success of ventures like the Starlink communications network of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“The low earth orbit has been heavily polluted due to private participation, so understanding how to safeguard satellites there will have special importance in today’s space environment,” said Rama Rao Nidamanuri, head of the department of earth and space sciences at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.

Longer term, data from the mission could help better understand the sun’s impact on earth’s climate patterns and the origins of solar wind, the stream of particles that flow from the sun through the solar system, ISRO scientists have said.

Pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has privatised space launches and is looking to open the sector to foreign investment as it targets a five-fold increase in its share of the global launch market within the next decade.

As space turns into a global business, the country is also banking on the success of ISRO to showcase its prowess in the sector.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) LVM3 launch rocket blasted off from the country’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh on Friday afternoon, leaving behind a plume of smoke and fire.

About 16 minutes later, ISRO’s mission control announced that the rocket had succeeded in putting the Chandrayaan-3 lander into an Earth orbit that will send it looping toward a moon landing next month.

If the mission succeeds, India would join a group of three other countries that have managed a controlled lunar landing, including the United States, the former Soviet Union and China.

The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft would also be the first to land at the lunar south pole, an area of special interest for space agencies and private space companies because of the presence of water ice that could support a future space station.

The rocket blasted off from India’s main spaceport at 2:35 p.m. local time (0905 GMT). Over 1.4 million people watched the launch on ISRO’s YouTube channel, many offering congratulations and the patriotic slogan “Jai Hind” (Victory to India).

In 2020, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 mission successfully deployed an orbiter but its lander and rover were destroyed in a crash near where the Chandrayan-3 will attempt a touchdown.

Chandrayaan, which means “moon vehicle” in Sanskrit, includes a 2-metre-(6.6-foot)-tall lander designed to deploy a rover near the moon’s south pole, where it is expected to remain functional for two weeks running a series of experiments.

The lunar landing is expected on Aug. 23, ISRO has said.

The launch is India’s first major mission since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced policies to spur investment in space launches and related satellite-based businesses.

Modi had earlier said on Twitter that the moon mission “will carry the hopes and dreams of our nation”.

“As Mother India enters into the next 25 years, she pledges to play a leading global role in the emerging world scenario,” Deputy Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh said in an event at the spaceport to celebrate the launch.

Since 2020, when India opened to private launches, the number of space startups has more than doubled. Late last year, Skyroot Aerospace, whose investors include Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, launched India’s first privately built rocket.

Television footage showed the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) LVM3 launch rocket blast off from the country’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, leaving behind a plume of smoke and fire.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission is designed to deploy a lander and rover near the moon’s south pole around Aug. 23.

Only three other space agencies – the United States, the former Soviet Union and China – have touched down a lander on the moon’s surface. None have landed near the lunar south pole.

The third Chandrayaan, which means “moon vehicle” in Sanskrit, includes a 2m tall lander designed to deploy a rover near the lunar south pole, where it is expected to remain functional for two weeks running a series of experiments.

ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2020 successfully deployed an orbiter but its lander and rover were destroyed in a crash near where the Chandrayan-3 will attempt a touchdown.

The discovery was based on data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, the first to orbit Saturn, during its 13-year landmark exploration of the gaseous giant planet, its rings and its moons from 2004 to 2017.

The findings were published by a German-led international team of scientists in the journal Nature and announced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) outside of Los Angeles, which designed and built the Cassini probe.

The same team previously confirmed that Enceladus’ ice grains contain a rich assortment of minerals and complex organic compounds, including the ingredients for amino acids, associated with life as scientists know it.

But phosphorus, the least abundant of six chemical elements considered necessary to all living things – the others are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur – was still missing from the equation until now.

“It’s the first time this essential element has been discovered in an ocean beyond Earth,” the study’s lead author, Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the Free University in Berlin, said in a JPL press release.

Phosphorus is fundamental to the structure of DNA and a vital part of cell membranes and energy-carrying molecules existing in all forms of life on Earth.

The latest study stems from measurements taken by Cassini as it flew through salt-rich ice grains ejected into space from geysers erupting from the subsurface ocean beneath Enceladus’ frozen crust at its south pole.

The spacecraft gathered its data during passes through a plume of ice crystals itself, and through the same material that feeds Saturn’s faint “E” ring with icy particles outside the planet’s brighter main rings.

The interior ocean discovered by Cassini has made Enceladus – about one-seventh the size of Earth’s moon and the sixth largest among Saturn’s 146 known natural satellites – a prime candidate in the search for places in our solar system beyond Earth that are habitable, if only to microbes.

Another is Jupiter’s larger moon Europa, which also is believed to harbor a global ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface.

One notable aspect of the latest Enceladus discovery was geochemical modeling by the study’s co-authors in Europe and Japan showing that phosphorus exists in concentrations at least 100 times that of Earth’s oceans, bound water-soluble forms of phosphate compounds.

“This key ingredient could be abundant enough to potentially support life in Enceladus’ ocean,” said co-investigator Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “This is a stunning discovery for astrobiology.”

Still, scientists stressed that the presence of phosphorus, complex organic compounds, water and other fundamental building blocks of life are evidence only that a place such as Enceladus is potentially habitable, not that is inhabited. Life, either past or present, has not been confirmed anywhere beyond Earth.

“Whether life could have originated in Enceladus’ ocean remains an open question,” Glein said.

A spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, NASA said Tuesday in announcing the results of its save-the-world test.