Just a few days after the Pragyan rover’s soft landing on the south pole of the moon, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announces the launch date for its eagerly anticipated Aditya-L1 solar mission. The PSLV-C57 for the Aditya L1 mission will launch on September 2, according to the official tweet from ISRO.
The Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota will launch this observatory, the first space-based Indian observatory to study the sun, on September 2, 2023, at 11:50 IST. Users can register on the ISRO website if they want to view the PSLV-C57 rocket launch from the Launch View Gallery at Sriharikota.
Aditya-L1 is an ISRO mission that will travel 1.4 million kilometres, or four times the distance to the moon, from Earth. The spacecraft will be launched towards Lagrange Point (L1) using onboard propulsion after first being placed in a low-earth orbit and then being made more elliptical.
Lagrange points are places in space where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravitational fields have concentrated zones of attraction and repulsion that can be exploited to propel spacecraft. They bear the name Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an Italian-French mathematician.
The Aditya L1 mission will transport seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere, and corona in distinct wavebands. The Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) payload for the trip was designed and developed by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bengaluru. The Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT), which is comparable, was created by the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune.
These will help ISRO collect data on how the temperature of Corona can reach over a million degrees while the sun’s surface temperature reaches a maximum of over 6,000 degrees Celsius.
The most important data to comprehend the issue of coronal heating, coronal mass ejections (CME), pre-flare and flare activities and their features, dynamics of space weather, propagation of particles and fields, etc., is anticipated to be provided by the SUITs of the Aditya L1 payloads, according to ISRO.
The spacecraft will leave the gravitational sphere of influence (SOI) of the earth as it moves closer to L1. The spacecraft will be propelled into a broad halo orbit around L1 during the cruise phase.
According to ISRO, this mission will cover a distance of 1.5 million kilometres in a total travel duration of around four months from launch to L1.
Gaining a greater understanding of the sun, including coronal heating and solar wind acceleration, the connection and dynamics of the solar atmosphere, solar wind distribution, and temperature anisotropy, is the main goal of ISRO’s Aditya L1 mission.
