Aditya L1 LIVE: ‘Achieved with great precision’, says ex-ISRO chairman

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Aditya L1, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) maiden solar mission, successfully entered its final manoeuvre to reach its destination and injected into its final orbit today.
  • Launched on Sep 2 last year, the spacecraft has undergone four earth-bound manoeuvres & a Trans-Lagrangean Point 1 Insertion manoeuvre.
  • ISRO chief S Somanath told news agency ANI on Monday “Aditya-L1 is going to reach its L1 point on January 6 at 4pm and we are going to do the final manoeuvre to keep it there.”
  • Launched on September 2 last year, the spacecraft has undergone four earth-bound manoeuvres and a Trans-Lagrangean Point 1 Insertion (TL1I) manoeuvres, all successfully.
  • The mission aims to observe the Sun’s corona and understand its extreme heat from a halo orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1), which is located roughly 1.5 million km from the Earth.
  • The Lagrange Point is a unique region where gravitational forces between the Earth and the Sun reach equilibrium.
  • While absolute neutralization is not achievable due to the influence of other celestial bodies such as the Moon, Mars, and Venus, the L1 point provides a stable position for observational purposes.
  • The suits of Aditya L1 payloads are expected to provide the “most crucial information” to understand the problem of coronal heating, coronal mass ejection, pre-flare and flare activities and their characteristics, dynamics of space weather, and propagation of particles and fields, officials said.
  • The major science objectives of the Aditya-L1 mission include the study of the Solar upper atmospheric (chromosphere and corona) dynamics, the study of chromospheric and coronal heating, physics of the partially ionized plasma, initiation of the coronal mass ejections, and flares, observation of the in-situ particle and plasma environment, providing data for the study of particle dynamics from the Sun among others.

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