The latest mission in India’s ambitious space program began on Saturday with a trip to the center of the solar system, a week after the country’s successful drone landing on the moon. Aditya-L1 was launched shortly before noon in a live broadcast showing hundreds of spectators cheering wildly against the deafening noise of the rocket’s takeoff.

“The launch is successful, all is well,” said the flight control representative of the Indian Space Research Organisation, as the vehicle made its way into the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere.

The mission has scientific instruments to observe the outer layers of the Sun during the four-month journey. The United States and the European Space Agency (ESA) sent numerous probes to the center of the Solar System, starting with NASA’s Pioneer program in the 1960s.

Japan and China have launched their own solar observatory missions to Earth orbit. But if successful, the latest mission of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will be the first Asian country to orbit the Sun.

“This is a challenging task for India,” astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhuri told NDTV on Friday.

Raychaudhuri said the mission’s probe will study coronal mass ejections, a periodic event accompanied by massive eruptions of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun’s atmosphere. These flares are so powerful that they can reach Earth and potentially disrupt satellites.

It will help predict this phenomenon and “warn everyone for the satellites to shut down,” Aditya said. “It will also help us understand how this happened and we may not need a warning system in the future.”

Aditya, the name of the Hindu sun god, will travel 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) to reach his destination; which is only one percent of the enormous distance between the Earth and the sun. At this point, the gravitational forces of both celestial bodies cancel each other out, keeping the mission in a stable halo orbit around our nearest star.

Aditya will travel on the ISRO-developed 320-tonne PSLV XL rocket, which forms the backbone of India’s space program and has previously performed launches to the Moon and Mars. The mission also aims to shed light on the dynamics of several other solar events by imaging and measuring particles in the Sun’s upper atmosphere.

budget program

India consistently captures the achievements of well-known space powers at a fraction of their cost. The South Asian country has a relatively low-budget space program that has grown significantly in size and momentum since it first sent a probe into lunar orbit in 2008.

Experts say India can keep costs low by copying and adapting existing technologies and thanks to a large number of highly skilled engineers who are paid far less than their foreign counterparts. Last month’s successful Moon landing, previously performed only by Russia, the United States and China, cost less than $75 million.

The landing was widely celebrated by the public with prayer rituals to wish the mission success, and by schoolchildren during live broadcasts in classrooms after the final landing. India became the first Asian country to launch a spacecraft into Mars orbit in 2014, and plans to launch a three-day crewed mission to Earth orbit next year.

It also plans to launch a joint mission with Japan to send another probe to the Moon by 2025, and an orbital mission to Venus in the next two years.