After successfully landing on the Moon, the Indian Space Research Organization is all set to launch the Aditya-L1 mission to study the Sun at 11.50 am on Saturday from the second launch pad at Sriharikota.
The 1,480 kg spacecraft will be transported by India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and placed into a 235 km x 19,500 km highly elliptical orbit around the Earth. The PSLV in XL configuration, which has six solid-fueled boosters, will take just over an hour to put the satellite into orbit.
The orbit as well as the spacecraft’s velocity will then be increased until it plummets toward the Sun. The distance of 1.5 million km to the L1 point will take nearly 4 months (125 days). The spacecraft will then be put into a halo orbit around the L1 point. The seven science experiments on board will continue to collect data over the next five years.
The 23:40 countdown begins shortly after noon on Friday. The range that the spacecraft will travel is only 1% of the 150 million km distance to the Sun. “The Sun is a giant ball of gas and Aditya-L1 will study the Sun’s outer atmosphere. Aditya-L1 will neither land on the Sun nor approach the Sun any closer,” the space agency said on Friday.
Explain
Why point L1?
The L1 point is much further out than the Moon’s orbit, and it does not have any other planets passing by so the view from the spacecraft would not be subject to an eclipse even if it were experienced on Earth. Studying the sun from space also ensures that there are no distortions to measurements that can occur on Earth due to the atmosphere, magnetic fields, and dust particles.
ISRO lists the payloads and their capabilities as follows:
| Type | Row block | Ability |
|
Remote sensing payload |
Visible Emission Line (VELC) | Corona/Image & Spectrum |
| The Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) | Photosphere and Chromosphere Imaging- Narrowband & Broadband | |
| Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS) | Soft X-ray Spectrometer: Observing the Sun as a Star | |
| High Energy L1 Orbital X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) | Hard X-ray spectrometer: Observe the sun as a star | |
|
Load in place |
||
| Aditya Solar Wind Particle Experiment (ASPEX) | Heavier Proton & Ion Solar Wind/Particle Analyzer with Instructions | |
| Plasma Analysis Package for Aditya (PAPA) |
Heavier Electron & Ion Solar Wind/Particle Analyzer with Instructions |
|
| Advanced three-axis high-resolution digital magnetometer | Local magnetic fields (Bx, By and Bz). |
The Solar mission, which comes soon after the historic Chandrayaan-3 mission that brought India into an elite club of four countries that have made soft landings on the Moon, was planned to allow time Best observation to study the Sun.
“For a mission to L1, the ideal launch date is January through September, considering fuel requirements and planetary position. The good thing is that the spacecraft will reach its designated orbit as early as 2024, allowing it to have a few months of observing the ascending solar cycle and then the descending solar cycle in 2025,” said Professor R Ramesh. from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, his team, said. was involved in developing the scientific experiments that will be carried out by the mission. The solar cycle typically follows an 11-year pattern.
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The mission was initially conceptualized as just a test to study a layer of the Sun’s atmosphere called the Corona from low-Earth orbit in 2006. The mission was later transitioned to a mission with are more sophisticated observatory satellites that can study the Sun from point L1 without any interference caused by events such as solar eclipses.
There are five Lagrangian points between any two celestial bodies – these can act as stops in space where the gravitational force of the celestial bodies equals the centripetal force needed to keep a satellite in orbit. This means that satellites located at Lagrange points do not need to consume a lot of fuel to stay in place.
The main goal of the mission is to gain a deeper understanding of our closest star and how its radiation, heat, particle streams and magnetic fields affect us. The advanced scientific experiment will also allow researchers to peer into the lower layers of the solar halo, hoping to provide clues as to why the halo has a temperature of one million degrees Celsius when the Sun’s surface is just has a temperature of 5,500 degrees Celsius.
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