After landing on the moon and when the experiments are on, ISRO is aiming at the Sun.
ISRO will aim for the Sun on Saturday with the launch of Aditya-L1, its maiden solar expedition. To be sure, this mission also has a few firsts,
The 23-hour-10-minute countdown commenced on Friday for the blast-off scheduled at 11.50 am on Saturday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. ISRO will use its PSLV-XL rocket to launch the spacecraft on its 125-day voyage to the Sun.
Aditya-L1 will reach Lagrange point L1, its space home 1.5 million km away from the Earth, in January next year.
Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) chairman S. Somanath said the Sun mission is designed to provide remote observations of the solar corona (the Sun’s outermost layer) and conduct observations of the solar wind at L1 (Sun-Earth Lagrangian point), the spot in space that Aditya-L1 will orbit.
Aditya-L1 is equipped with seven scientific payloads designed to study various aspects of the Sun. These payloads are expected to provide the most crucial information to understand the problems of coronal heating, solar wind acceleration, coronal mass ejection (CME), pre-flare, and flare activities, and their characteristics, dynamics, and space weather, comprehending the coupling and dynamics of the solar atmosphere, and examining solar wind distribution and temperature anisotropy.
