Finance
The Indian Space Research Organization is getting ready to launch its first ambitious mission to study the Sun. The Aditya L1 mission is set to launch on Saturday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on a four-month journey to its objective, Lagrange Point 1.
The PSLV-XL will take more than 60 minutes to launch the Aditya L1 spacecraft into orbit. This will be one of the PSLV’s longest missions. Here’s a glance at PSLV as it prepares for a picture-perfect launch.
Aditya L1 will be India’s first space-based mission to study the Sun. The spacecraft will be positioned in a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth system’s Lagrange point 1 (L1), which is approximately 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth. A satellite in halo orbit around the L1 point has the significant benefit of continuously viewing the Sun with no occultation/eclipses. This will give us a better chance of seeing solar activity and its impact on space weather in real time. The spacecraft includes seven payloads that will use electromagnetic, particle, and magnetic field detectors to study the photosphere, chromosphere, and the Sun’s outermost layers (the corona). Four payloads glimpse the Sun directly from the exceptional vantage point L1 and the remaining three payloads carry out in-situ studies of particles and fields at the Lagrange point L1, thus providing important scientific studies of the propagatory effect of solar dynamics in the interplanetary medium
The suits of Aditya L1 payloads are expected to provide most crucial informations to understand the problem of coronal heating, coronal mass ejection, pre-flare and flare activities and their characteristics, dynamics of space weather, propagation of particle and fields etc.
Science Objectives:
The major science objectives of Aditya-L1 mission are:
- Study of Solar upper atmospheric (chromosphere and corona) dynamics.
- Study of 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 providing data for the study of particle dynamics from the Sun.
- Physics of solar corona and its heating mechanism.
- Diagnostics of the coronal and coronal loops plasma: Temperature, velocity and density.
- Development, dynamics and origin of CMEs.
- 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 .
- Drivers for space weather (origin, composition and dynamics of solar wind .
