India is launching its first space solar observatory mission called Aditya-L1 to study the sun – just days after the successful landing of India’s lunar rover mission Chandrayaan-3.
The Aditya-L1 will be launched at 11:20 p.m. PT Sept. 1 (11:50 a.m. EDT Sept. 2) from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, southern India using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-XL). ), Indian Space Agency. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) announce on monday. After launch, the spacecraft will need approximately 109 days to reach a halo orbit around Lagrangian Point 1 (L1), located between the Sun and Earth, about 933,000 miles away.
ISRO Objectives To better understand coronal heating, coronal mass ejection, preglow and flare activities and their properties, space weather dynamics and scattering of particles and fields through the Aditya-L1 mission. The 3,300-pound satellite includes a number of science, observation and experiment payloads, including four remote sensing payloads.
Aditya-L1, codenamed PSLV-C57, has various scientific objectives, such as examining the dynamics of the solar upper atmosphere, investigating heating of the chromosphere and corona, observing in situ particle and plasma environments, and studying the physics of the solar corona and its heating mechanism. The mission also aims to identify the drivers of space weather.
In 2008, Aditya-L1 was originally conceived as Aditya (“sun” in Hindi) to study the solar corona – the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere. However, ISRO later renamed the mission Aditya L-1 to broaden its target and present it as a full-fledged observatory for the study of solar and space environments.
The Indian government committed approximately US$46 million to the Aditya-L1 mission in 2019, although updates on mission costs have not been disclosed yet.
Last week, the space agency attracted international attention for the successful landing of its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which was launched in July as the successor to Chandrayaan-2 that crashed in 2019. The spacecraft’s notable achievement made India the first country to land on the south pole of the Moon and the fourth country in the world to make a landing. Smooth on the Moon, following the former Soviet Union, the United States and China.