Following the success of its historic recent moon landing, India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is launching its first solar probe this weekend. The Aditya-L1 mission is scheduled to launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India at 2:20 a.m. ET on Saturday, September 2 (11:20 p.m. PT on Friday, September 1).
The satellite will be heading for the first Lagrange point, L1, which is a stable orbit around the sun that is used by several other sun-studying missions. Aditya-L1 will join the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission, and a long-standing NASA mission called the Advanced Composition Explorer in this orbit. L1 is opposite the L2 Lagrange point, which is the home of telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and the recently launched Euclid space telescope.
When at L1, Aditya-L1 will investigate how and why an upper portion of the atmosphere, called the corona, gets so hot. The corona is much hotter than the surface of the sun, and it’s not entirely clear why this is. Aditya-L1 will also study the sun’s magnetic fields and look at what aspects of the sun’s behavior drive the space weather that can affect communications systems here on Earth.
The satellite carries seven instruments, including spectrometers, a magnetometer, and a coronagraph, as well as an experiment into solar wind particles. “Using the special vantage point L1, four payloads directly view the sun and the remaining three payloads carry out in-situ studies of particles and fields at the Lagrange point L1, thus providing important scientific studies of the propagatory effect of solar dynamics in the interplanetary medium,” the ISRO explains.
This will be India’s first mission to study the sun, and it will have to travel around 1 million miles from the Earth to reach its L1 destination. The spacecraft will not travel there directly, however, but will rather use a transfer maneuver to adjust its course around the Earth before heading out to L1. More details on the maneuver are available on the website of the European Space Agency, which is supporting the mission with communications services and flight dynamics software.
The launch will be lives-streamed by ISRO on its website or on YouTube. You can also watch using the video embedded below, with coverage beginning at 1:50 a.m. ET on September 2 (10:50 p.m. PT on September 1).
