India's sun-monitoring spacecraft has crossed a landmark point on its journey to escape "the sphere of Earth's influence", its space agency said, days after the disappointment of its moon rover failing to awaken.

The Aditya-L1 mission, which started its four-month journey towards the center of the solar system on September 2, carries instruments to observe the sun's outermost layers.

"The spacecraft has escaped the sphere of Earth's influence," the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement late Saturday.

Aditya, named after the Hindu sun deity, has traveled 920,000 kilometers (570,000 miles), just over half the journey's total distance.

At that point, the gravitational forces of both astronomical bodies cancel out, allowing the mission to remain in a stable halo orbit around our nearest star.

"This is the second time in succession that ISRO could send a spacecraft outside the sphere of influence of the Earth, the first time being the Mars Orbiter Mission", the agency added.

In August, India became the first country to land a craft near the largely unexplored lunar south pole, and just the fourth nation to land on the moon.

When Indian entrepreneur Awais Ahmed founded his satellite startup in Bangalore in 2019, his country was still a year away from opening the space industry to the private sector.

"When we started, there was absolutely no support, no momentum," said Ahmed, who was 21 when he founded Pixxel, a company deploying a constellation of Earth imaging satellites.

Since then, the private space sector has taken off in India, joining a rapidly growing global market.

There are now 190 Indian space start-ups, twice as many as a year earlier, with private investments jumping by 77 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to Deloitte consultancy.

"A lot of Indian investors were not willing to look at space technology, because it was too much of a risk earlier," Ahmed said in an interview with AFP.