Bengaluru: After the successful Chandrayaan-3 mission to the Moon, ISRO announced that India’s first solar mission Aditya-L1 to study the Sun will be launched on September 2 at 11.50 am from Sriharikota spaceport.
Aditya-L1 spacecraft is designed to provide remote observations of the solar corona and in-situ observations of the solar wind at L1 (Sun-Earth Lagrange point), which is about 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth.
Lagrange Points are positions in space where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth produce enhanced regions of attraction and repulsion.
These can be used by spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position, according to NASA. Lagrange points are named in honor of Italian-French mathematician Josephy-Louis Lagrange.
It will be the first dedicated Indian space mission for observations of the Sun to be launched by the Bengaluru-headquartered space agency.
The space agency said in a social media post that the spacecraft — the first space-based Indian observatory to study the Sun — would be launched by PSLV-C57 rocket.
The Aditya-L1 mission, aimed at studying the Sun from an orbit around the L1, would carry seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun, the corona, in different wavebands.
PTI