Our daily spaceflight around the world

🚀🇮🇳 India launched its first spacecraft dedicated to studying the Sun. One of the main goals of the mission is to study how solar phenomena like coronal mass ejections, an expulsion of solar particles that creates the Northern/Southern Lights, can affect orbiting satellites and power grids across the globe. Saturday’s launch came nearly two weeks after India became the fourth country to successfully land on the Moon and the first to land at the lunar south pole (quick update on that mission: India's rover switched off on Sunday, though it could be reactivated in the future).

🇫🇷🛵 Rental scooters are now banned in Paris. The new law, which went into effect Friday, follows an April public referendum where nearly 90% of voters cast a ballot in support of the ban (though only 8% of the voting-age population turned out to vote). Since the city first approved rental scooters in 2018, three people have died as a result of getting struck by riders – and, as anyone living in a big city knows, the scooters end up scattered everywhere. Paris joins a handful of other major cities with similar bans, including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Montreal, and Las Vegas.

🇺🇳🇨🇳 A UN body revealed new evidence of China’s human rights abuses in the Xinjiang province. The UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which investigates alleged cases of arbitrary detention across the world, issued opinions on three cases involving Uyghur Muslims, whom it determined were victims of enforced disappearance. While China has attempted to keep its actions in Xinjiang a secret, the UN estimates between 900,000–1.8 million predominantly Muslim people have been involuntarily sent to the region’s high-security “reeducation camps,” where torture, forced medication, and rape are reportedly common.