Aditya-L1 Launch

This is India's first solar space observatory mission...

On Saturday, 02 September 2023, India launched the Aditya-L1 mission.

India's first solar space observatory mission has been launched on the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) XL from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The separation of Aditya-L1 is expected to take about 63 minutes.

Aditya-L1 will be placed in the halo orbit around Lagrange point 1 (L1), which is about 1.5 million km from Earth. The journey will take nearly 125 days.

Mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange's discovery told, that Lagrangian points are places in space where gravitational forces, acting between two objects, balance each other in such a way that spacecraft can remain in a fixed position with minimal fuel consumption.

The L1 point is considered the most significant of the Lagrangian points for solar observations.

According to ISRO, the key objectives of the mission are understanding the coronal heating and solar wind acceleration; understanding the initiation of Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), flares, and near-earth space weather; gaining knowledge of coupling and dynamics of the solar atmosphere; and getting a deeper understanding of solar wind distribution and temperature anisotropy (non-uniformity in different directions).

Solar wind refers to a continuous flow of protons and electrons from the sun's corona, or outermost atmosphere, while coronal mass ejections are huge expulsions of coronal plasma and magnetic field lines ejected from the sun.