India’s first mission to study the sun to begin by June-July

Source: The post is based on the article “India’s first mission to study the sun to begin by June-July” published in The Hindu on 27th January 2023

What is the News?

The Indian Space Research Organisation(ISRO) is planning to launch the Aditya-L1 mission by June or July 2023.

What is Aditya L1?

Aditya-L1 is the first Indian space mission to observe the Sun and the solar corona.

Objective of the mission: To study solar upper atmospheric (chromosphere and corona) dynamics and understand the physics of the solar corona and its heating mechanism.

The mission will be launched 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.

Payloads: Aditya-L1 has seven payloads in total, of which the primary payload is the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph(VELC).The other six payloads are being developed by the ISRO and other scientific institutions.

What is Visible Emission Line Coronagraph(VELC)?

VELC is the largest payload to be carried on board the Aditya-L1.It is designed and fabricated by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru.

Purpose: It is an internally occulted solar coronagraph capable of simultaneous imaging, spectroscopy and spectro-polarimetry close to the solar limb.

Significance: 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 or level of detail and many times a second.