Moon done, let's go study the Sun: ISRO to launch Aditya-L1 on September 2

Barely ten days after the successful soft-landing of the Chandrayaan-3 craft near the Lunar South Pole, the Indian space agency is ready for its next launch, on Saturday 2nd September at 11:50 am (Indian Standard Time).

This time around, ISRO will be launching its maiden mission to study the sun and solar phenomenon. The mission is titled Aditya-L1, on board the PSLV C57 rocket.

L1 refers to the vantage point around which the craft will be positioning itself to study the sun, without any obstructions. This L1 point, or Lagrangian point 1 is situated 1.5 million kms away from the Earth. The distance between Earth and the sun is 150 million kilometres and it would take 4 months from launch for the Aditya-L1 craft to reach its destination.

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"The preparation for Aditya-L1 is going on really well. At the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, final checks are being carried out on the spacecraft and the PSLV rocket(mission number C57) for this mission is being assembled," A.Rajarajan, the Director of the spaceport had told WION, on August 23rd.

Speaking to WION after the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3, he had said that the Aditya-L1 mission is to be launched in the first week of September. So far, the Indian space agency has launched six missions in the year 2023. While four of these missions were for India's own national and scientific purposes, two of them have been missions for foreign customers. ISRO has had a great year with successes in all launch missions.

Notably, the launch activity of ISRO had drastically slowed down in 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. This had caused delays to several missions and led to a backlog in the activity.

Queried about how the spaceport is handling various missions simultaneously, Rajarajan told WION that the team had learnt several lessons during the pandemic and accordingly made their work processes more optimised and efficient. He indicated how ISRO had been able to fulfil both national and commercial missions, while also making arrangements for Indian space sector startups to use their facilities for development and testing activities.

Further queried about how the launch calendar looked for the next four months, he said that there could be four launches including Aditya-L1, experimental flights as part of the Gaganyaan development programme, followed by PSLV and GSLV launches.

In 2022, the Indian space agency designated senior Solar Scientist Dr. Sankarasubramanian as the Principal Scientist of the 'Aditya-L1' Mission.

He heads the Space Astronomy Group (SAG) of ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Centre, Bengaluru and has contributed to ISRO missions, such as Chandrayaan 1 &2, and AstroSat, in several capacities.

Aditya-L1 is the first observatory-class space-based solar mission from India.

The spacecraft is to be placed in a halo orbit around the first Lagrange point, L1, of the Sun-Earth system.

A satellite around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without occultation/eclipses. This position provides a greater advantage of observing solar activities continuously.

Aditya-L1 carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere, and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle detectors.

According to ISRO, four payloads on Aditya-L1 will directly view the Sun from the unique vantage point of L1, and the remaining three payloads will carry out in-situ studies of particles and fields at the Lagrange point L1.

Also watch |All about ISRO's Aditya L1 mission to the Sun

Why study the Sun from Space?

The sun emits radiation/light in nearly all wavelengths along with various energetic particles and a magnetic field.

The atmosphere of the Earth as well as its magnetic field acts as a protective shield and blocks a number of harmful wavelength radiations including particles and fields.

As various radiations don’t reach the surface of the Earth, the instruments from the Earth will not be able to detect such radiation and solar studies based on these radiations could not be carried out.

However, such studies can be carried out by making observations from outside the Earth's atmosphere i.e., from space.

Similarly, to understand how the solar wind particles and magnetic field from the Sun travel through interplanetary space, measurements are to be performed from a point that is far away from the influence of the Earth’s magnetic field.

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