Solar Mission Aditya-L1: ISRO Chairman S Somanath has said the space agency was getting ready for tomorrow’s launch of the country’s ambitious solar mission Aditya-L1, and that the countdown for its launch will start today.
The launch of the first space-based Indian observatory to study the Sun, is scheduled at 11.50 hrs from Sriharikota space station in Andhra Pradesh. The satellite will be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrange point L1 of the Sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million kms from the Earth.
It will take around four months to reach the Lagrange point. The advantage of halo orbit around the L1 point is that the satellite can observe the solar activities without any obstruction by other celestial activities like eclipse. The Aditya L1 mission is to study the solar winds and Sun’s atmosphere. It will carry seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun namely corona.
This will help understand the problems of coronal heating, Coronal mass ejection, pre-flare and flare activities, dynamics of weather, study of propagation of particles and fields in the interplanetary medium.
