ISRO chief says Aditya-L1 set to reach its final destination on this date

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath on Monday said India's maiden solar mission, Aditya L1, is set for its final manoeuvre to reach its destination – L1 point -- on January 6.

"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," Somanath said to news agency ANI on the sidelines of the launch of ISRO's maiden Xray mission, XPoSat, to study black holes.

Upon reaching its final destination, the spacecraft will be able to view the sun without any eclipses.

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 ISRO chief earlier said that the space agency will have a very controlled burn of the engine of Aditya L1 so that it enters an orbit called the halo orbit.

All six payloads have been tested and "working beautifully", he said, adding all are giving very good data.

"After the insertion the satellite will be destined to look at the Sun forever as long as its electronics inside are healthy and ready to transmit data. We hope to find out a lot of correlation between the solar corona and mass ejection and impact on space weather we are facing everyday," Somanath added.

ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C57) on September 2 successfully launched the Aditya-L1 spacecraft from the Second Launch Pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota.

After a flight duration of 63 minutes and 20 seconds that day, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft was successfully injected into an elliptical orbit of 235x19500 km around the Earth.

Aditya-L1 is the first Indian space-based observatory to study the Sun from a halo orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1), which is located roughly 1.5 million km from the Earth.

Lagrange point is a region where gravity between earth and sun will neutralise. Absolute neutralisation is not possible because there are other bodies like the Moon, Mars, Venus.

Aditya-L1 carried seven scientific payloads indigenously developed by ISRO and national research laboratories. The payloads are to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic particle and magnetic field detectors.

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.

(With inputs from agencies)