After the successful landing of Chandrayaan-2 on the Moon, ISRO is ready to launch Aditya-L1, a mission to study the Sun, at 11:50 AM on Saturday. The 1,480-kilogram (kg) Aditya-L1 spacecraft will be launched by India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in its XL configuration.
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft will be placed in a highly elliptical orbit of 235 kilometres by 19,500 kilometres around the Earth. After the launch, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft will be placed in elliptical orbit around the Earth. The orbit will then be gradually increased until the spacecraft is slingshot towards the Sun.
The seven science experiments onboard will then continue collecting data for the next five years. The 23-hour 40-minute countdown for the launch of the Aditya-L1 spacecraft began just after noon on Friday. The spacecraft will move a distance of just 1% of the 150 million kilometres between the Earth and the Sun.
The Sun is a giant sphere of gas, and Aditya-L1 will study its outer atmosphere. The spacecraft will not land on the Sun or approach it any closer. The Aditya-L1 mission, which follows the historic Chandrayaan-3 mission, has been planned to take advantage of the best observation window to study the Sun.
The Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is most easily observed from a point between the Earth and the Sun, and the Aditya-L1 spacecraft will be placed in a halo orbit around this point. The L1 point is launched between January and September. This is because the fuel requirements and planetary positions are most favourable during this time.
The good news is that the Aditya-L1 spacecraft will reach its designated orbit in early 2024, which will allow it to observe the ascending solar cycle and then the descending cycle in 2025. This is because the fuel requirements and planetary positions are most favourable during this time.
The good news is that the Aditya-L1 spacecraft will reach its designated orbit in early 2024, which will allow it to observe the ascending solar cycle and then the descending cycle in 2025. The Aditya-L1 mission was originally conceived in 2006 as an experiment to study the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, from a low Earth orbit.
However, the mission was later upgraded to include more complex instruments and to be placed in a halo orbit around the L1 point, which is a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the Sun. There are five Lagrange points, or "L points," between any two celestial bodies. These points are stable equilibrium points where the gravitational pull of the two bodies balances out the centrifugal force required to keep a satellite in orbit.
This means that satellites placed at Lagrange points can maintain their position with minimal fuel expenditure. The main reason for the Aditya-L1 mission is to study the Sun in detail and how its radiation, heat, flow of particles and magnetic fields affect us.