Aditya-L1 launch | India is preparing for its first solar expedition, which is scheduled to launch in early September.
The observatory, called Aditya-L1 (“Aditya” means “sun” in Sanskrit), reached its launch site on the island of Sriharikota, off the east coast of India.
Table of Contents
ISRO shared First Images of Aditya-L1
India’s national space agency, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which is conducting the mission, shared the first images of the spacecraft on August 14 on X (formerly Twitter).
Although the sun has long been studied, scientists are still baffled by how its outer atmosphere, known as the corona, gets so hot — about 1.8 million Fahrenheit (1 million Celsius) hotter than the sun’s surface. Scientists know little about exactly what happens in the sun before it releases solar flares and huge clouds of plasma called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) into space—and sometimes to Earth—and how CMEs accelerate to enormous speeds near the sun disk.
Scientists hope the Aditya-L1 observatory will provide clues to these decades-old mysteries.
Stages of Mission
Although ISRO has not yet announced the launch date of the mission, the spacecraft is expected to take off on a four-stage rocket in the first week of September, according to local media.
The rocket called Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, will put the observatory into a stable circular orbit around Earth first. Once scientists are confident that its seven onboard instruments survived the launch in good condition, the spacecraft’s circular orbit will be stretched into an egg-shaped path that will begin its four-month journey to its final destination.
Read Malayalam Sports News | Drishti news Malayalam
The observatory will eventually go to a space parking lot about a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, with an unobstructed view of the Sun. This cosmic outpost, called Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1, or L1, is also home to the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a NASA-European Space Agency project that has been monitoring solar activity since 1996.
The Design
Four of Aditya’s seven payloads are designed for direct solar viewing. These include two X-ray spectrometers that examines the properties of the sun’s rays, a coronagraph that takes continuous images of the sun to find out solar flares, and a fourth instrument to measure solar radiation.
Hero Karizma XMR 210 launching in 2023 August 29 | Images Revealed
Of the remaining three scientific instruments, two are equipped to examine the solar wind and its components. The third one is a magnetometer that measures magnetic fields at the L1 location of the spacecraft, based on the mission plan.
The Aditya-L1 observatory cost nearly 3.8 billion rupees ($45 million) and is 15 years in the making. It is India’s second vital launch this year. Last month, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft took off from Sriharikota on its fuel-efficient journey to the Moon and is expected to land on August 23 or 24.