The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning to launch the Aditya-L1 mission by June or July 2023. ISRO chairman S. Somanath, announced the schedule during the handing over ceremony of the Visible Line Emission Coronagraph (VELC) payload on January 26.
Key points
- Aditya-L1 is the first Indian space mission to observe the Sun and the solar corona.
- The Aditya-L1 mission will be launched by June or July as the launch window for the mission would close by August.
- The Aditya-L1 mission will be launched by ISRO to the L1 orbit (which is the first Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system). L1 orbit allows Aditya-L1 to look at the Sun continuously.
- In total Aditya-L1 has seven payloads, of which the primary payload is the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), designed and fabricated by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru.
- VELC is the main instrument (VELC payload) on board the Aditya-L1 satellite.
- The other six payloads are being developed by the ISRO and other scientific institutions.
- Aditya-L1 aims to understand the effect of the Sun on the Earth and its surroundings.
- The payload will be able to observe the corona continuously and the data provided by it is expected to answer many outstanding problems in the field of solar astronomy.
- No other solar coronagraph in space has the ability to image the solar corona as close to the solar disk as VELC can. It can image it as close as 1.05 times the solar radius. It can also do imaging, spectroscopy, and polarimetry at the same time, and can take observations at a very high resolution (level of detail) and many times a second.
About Corona
- The corona is the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere where strong magnetic fields bind plasma and prevent turbulent solar winds from escaping. The Alfven point is when solar winds exceed a critical speed and can break free of the corona and the Sun’s magnetic fields.
- The corona is usually hidden by the bright light of the Sun’s surface. That makes it difficult to see without using special instruments. However, the corona can be viewed during a total solar eclipse.
- The corona is in the outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere—far from its surface. Yet the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the Sun’s surface.
- The corona is about 10 million times less dense than the Sun’s surface. This low density makes the corona much less bright than the surface of the Sun.
