XpoSat: India launches space mission to study black holes

It was launched from the Sriharikota spaceport at 9:10 am (local time) on Monday. This is NASA's second worldwide mission following its launch in 2021.

The space agency said it wanted to help scientists improve "our knowledge of black holes". "We are going through a very exciting time," Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) president S Somanath said after the launch.

A black hole is a region of space where matter has collapsed in on itself. Gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape.

Black holes are formed from the explosion of certain massive stars, some of which are truly massive, billions of times the mass of the Sun. Isro's X-ray Polarization Satellite (XPoSat) aims at deep exploration of black holes.

The XPoSat satellite was built at an estimated cost of 250 million rupees ($30 million, £23.5 million) and has a lifetime of five years. This launch comes after a very successful year for Isro. Last August, the lunar probe Chandrayaan 3 landed near the moon's south pole, a place no one had ever been before. A few days later, it launched Aditya-L1, the first mission to observe the Sun.

Monday's launch is just one of many projects Isro has planned this year. "2024 will be the year Gaganyaan is ready," Somnath said, referring to the project that will send three astronauts into low Earth orbit and return three days later.

Isro conducted the first of a series of test flights for the mission in October 2023 and aims to be ready for the manned mission by 2025.