ISRO planning to launch Aditya L-1 in 2020

ISRO planning to launch Aditya L-1 in 2020

ISRO is already planning its next ambitious launch and this time, it's aiming for the Sun.

The Aditya-L1 is the first Indian mission to study the Sun that will launch in 2020. At the moment, the future of ISRO's mission to the Moon faces an uncertain future.

The ISRO Aditya-L1 mission was earlier named as Aditya-1.

The satellite will now be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrangian point 1 (L1) of the Sun-Earth system, which has the advantages of viewing the Sun continuously without any occultation or eclipses, resulting in the name change.

The Aditya-L1 will be placed in a halo orbit around the L1, which is 1.5 million km from the Earth. The satellite carries an additional six payloads with enhanced science scope and objectives, ISRO states.

Purpose of Aditya L-1

• The earlier proposed Aditya-1 was meant to observe only the solar corona, which are the Sun's outer layers extending to thousands of kilometers from the solar object.
• Now with the proposed Aditya-L1, the mission plans to observe the Sun's Photosphere (soft and hard X-ray), Chromosphere (UV), and the corona (Visible and NIR).
• The additional experiment will also study the particle flux emanating from the Sun and reaching the L1 orbit.
• The variation of the magnetic field will also be measured with Aditya-L1's magnetometer payload.