The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is on a roll. In less than ten days after becoming the first space agency to soft land near the south pole of the Moon, it is set to launch the Aditya-L1 solar probe at 11.50 AM on Saturday, September 2 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
Aditya L1 will launch on the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and will take an approach similar to Chandrayaan-3 by first going into Earth orbit before increasing its velocity and tilt it puts itself on a path towards the Sun. The approximately 1.5-kilometre distance to L1 will be covered in about four months.
Aditya L1 will be the first space-based Indian mission to study the Sun. It is intended to be placed at a halo orbit around the first Lagrange point (L1) of the Sun and Earth. This will put it in an ideal position to continuously observe the Sun without any eclipses. The spacecraft will be studying solar activities and their effects on space weather in real-time.
It will carry seven payloads to the orbit to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and outermost layers of the Sun’s atmosphere using electromagnetic, particle and magnetic field detectors.
| Type | Payload | Capability |
|
Remote Sensing Payloads
|
Visible Emission Line Coronagraph(VELC) | Corona/Imaging & Spectroscopy |
| Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) | Photosphere and Chromosphere Imaging- Narrow & Broadband | |
| Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS) | Soft X-ray spectrometer: Sun-as-a-star observation | |
| High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer(HEL1OS) | Hard X-ray spectrometer: Sun-as-a-star observation | |
|
In-situ Payloads
|
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| Aditya Solar wind Particle Experiment(ASPEX) | Solar wind/Particle Analyzer Protons & Heavier Ions with directions | |
| Plasma Analyser Package For Aditya (PAPA) |
Solar wind/Particle Analyzer Electrons & Heavier Ions with directions
|
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| Advanced Tri-axial High Resolution Digital Magnetometers | In-situ magnetic field (Bx, By and Bz). |
The Aditya-L1 mission is the culmination of a decade of work conducted by scientists at ISRO, Pune’s Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and other organisations.
