Aditya L1 Mission : Weeks after creating history by landing on the South Pole of the Moon, ISRO is all set to launch Aditya L1, its spacecraft to study Sun, on September 2 at 11:50 am from Sriharikota.
ISRO in a post said the countdown for the event has been started .
Aditya L1 will travel 1.5 million km from Earth to Lagrange 1 or L1 point, between the Earth and Sun, four times the distance travelled by the Chandrayaan missions.
-- Gaganyaan: Man mission, plan to launch a crew of three to an orbit of 400 km (250 miles) for a three-day mission.
-- NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR), a low-Earth orbit observatory system jointly developed by NASA and ISRO. It map the entire planet once every 12 days, studying ecosystems, ice mass, vegetation biomass, sea level rise
-- 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
-- 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
-- Advanced Tri-axial High Resolution Digital Magnetometers: In-situ magnetic field (Bx, By and Bz).
The spacecraft will be placed at a halo orbit around L1 of the Sun and Earth, apparently an ideal position to continuously observe the Sun without any eclipses.
Isro scientists offered prayers at Tirumala temple on Friday. They visited the Sri Venkateswara temple atop Tirumala Hills where they prayed for the success of the mission to be launched on September 2 at 11.50 a.m. from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.
Aditya L1 will be at Lagrange point which is a point in space 15 lakh km away from the surface of Earth and where the attraction (gravitational pull of two bodies) cancels each other, says Debiprasad Duari, former director, MP Birla Institute of Fundamental Research.
It is on the elliptical orbit around the Sun, gradually drawing nearer with each orbit. The Parker Solar Probe will use Venus flybys to reduce its orbit around the Sun, approaching as close as 6.16 million kilometres from its surface. This is expected in June 2025
NASA's Parker Probe touched the Sun for the first time in history in 2021. The probe navigated Sun's upper atmosphere, known as the corona, and sampled particles and magnetic fields within.
The scientific payloads in Aditya L1 can’t afford to have even a micron (one-millionth of a metre) size dust particle. ISRO has completely refurbished the craft and reportedly counted the particle size to the lowest level possible.
The ISRO has listed the following major science objectives of Aditya-L1 mission:
-- Study Solar upper atmospheric (chromosphere and corona) dynamics.
-- Study chromospheric and coronal heating, physics of the partially ionized plasma, initiation of the Coronal Mass Ejections, and flares
-- Observe the in-situ particle and plasma environment to understand particle dynamics from the Sun.
-- Assess physics of solar corona and its heating mechanism
-- Study coronal and coronal loops plasma: Temperature, velocity and density.
-- Identify the sequence of processes that occur at multiple layers (chromosphere, base and extended corona) which eventually leads to solar eruptive events
-- Magnetic field topology and magnetic field measurements in the solar corona.
ESA is providing deep space communication services to the mission via there 35-metre deep space antennas in Australia, Spain and Argentina. It is main provider of ground station services for Aditya-L1. ESA stations will support the mission from beginning to end: from the critical ‘Launch and Early Orbit Phase’, throughout the journey to L1
The craft's seven instruments will investigate open questions about the Sun. Four of them will view the Sun directly, while the other three will carry out in-situ measurements to explore the nature of the space weather that the Sun generates in interplanetary space.
While L1 will be inhabited by Aditya, L2 is home to the James Webb Space Telescope since early last year.
There are five Lagrange points in all. L4 and L5 are seen as stable, L1, L2, and L3 are considered ‘unstable’. Nasa says L1 and L2 points are unstable on a time scale of approximately 23 days, which requires satellites orbiting these positions to undergo regular course corrections.
