Hello, Sun! ISRO is coming for you next

After successfully putting the Vikram lander at the moon’s south pole, an uncharted territory thus far, ISRO is ready to up its game with its next mission to the Sun with the Aditya-L1 spacecraft.

The ambitious solar mission will be launched in a week’s time, possibly on September 2, to study the Sun.

Aditya-L1 spacecraft is India’s maiden mission that is designed to provide remote observations of the solar corona and in situ observation of the solar winds at L1 (Sun-Earth Lagrangian point), which is about 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth.

The space mission will be launched by the Bengaluru-headquartered space agency.

According to news reports, the Aditya-L1 will be carrying a minimum of seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere, and the outermost layers of the Sun, the corona, in different wavebands.

The solar mission has been fully developed indigenously with the participation of a number of national-level institutes.

While the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph payload has been developed by the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), the Solar Ultraviolet Imager payload for the mission has been developed by theInter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune.

The spacecraft is planned to be placed in a halo orbit around the L1 of the Sun-Earth system, which gives it a significant advantage of viewing the Sun without any occultation/eclipses.

While four payloads will directly observe the Sun from the special vantage point L1, the other three will carry out in-situ studies of particles and fields at the L1.

This position will allow the payloads to carry out important scientific studies of the propagatory effect of solar dynamics in the interplanetary medium.

The space mission is designed to provide observations on the corona and on the solar chromosphere using the UV payload and on the flares using the X-ray payloads.

Meanwhile, the particle detectors and the magnetometer payload can provide information on charged particles and the magnetic field reaching the halo orbit around L1.

The observations will help scientists understand the problems of coronal heating, coronal mass ejection, pre-flare, and flare activities, and their characteristics, dynamics of space weather, propagation of particles and fields, etc.

According to ISRO, the major objectives of the Aditya-L1 mission are the 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.