Aditya L1, India’s ambitious solar exploration mission is inching a step closer to its final destination, with the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) set to attempt a crucial orbit manoeuvre to place the spacecraft into its final orbit on January 6 evening.
For an uninterrupted view of the Sun, ISRO would try to position the spacecraft into what is known as a ‘halo orbit’ around Lagrange Point 1 (L1).
“Aditya-L1 would reach its L1 point on January 6 at 4 pm. We would do the final manoeuvre to strategically place it in that halo orbit.” according to ISRO Chairman S Somanath.
L1 is one of the five positions in space where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth produce enhanced regions of attraction and repulsion, roughly balancing each other. The point is approximately 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth– just 1 per cent of the total distance between the two bodies.
After the successful soft landing of Chandrayaan-3 near the South pole of the moon, the ISRO launched the country’s maiden solar mission — Aditya-L1 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on September 2.
Aditya-L1 spacecraft is designed for providing remote observations of the solar corona and in-situ observations of the solar wind at L1 (Sun-Earth Lagrangian point), which is about 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth.
It is the first dedicated Indian space mission for observations of the Sun.Aimed at studying the Sun from an orbit around the L1, the mission carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun, the corona, in different wavebands.
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