CHENNAI: The 23 hours and 40 minutes countdown for the ambitious solar mission has begun on Friday afternoon.
The Aditya-L1 satellite carrying seven indigenously developed payloads will lift off from the second launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC-Shar) at Sriharikota on a PSLV-C57 rocket today at 11.50 am.
Initially, the Aditya-L1 satellite will be placed in a highly eccentric Earth-bound orbit and will later perform orbital manoeuvres using its onboard Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) to reach Sun-Earth Lagrange Point L1, (1.5 million kilometres from Earth, in a halo orbit) travelling for about four months. LAM developed by the ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC) has been crucial in satellite/spacecraft propulsion in India’s major space achievements, be it the three Chandrayaan expeditions or the 2013 Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM).
The total lift-off mass of the PSLV rocket would be 321 tonnes and the Aditya-L1 spacecraft weighs 1480.7kg. ISRO Chairman S Somanath said the solar mission will take 125 days to reach the exact radius. Aditya-L1 is designed to provide remote observations of the solar corona and conduct in-situ observations of the solar wind at L1.
Aditya-L1 will be the first space-based observatory class Indian solar mission to study the sun. The satellite that carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere, and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle detectors, is expected to provide the most crucial information to understand the problems of coronal heating, coronal mass ejection, pre-flare and flare activities, and their characteristics, the ISRO said.
SDSC-Shar director A Rajarajan told TNIE several precautionary measures were taken for this mission like 24/7 pure nitrogen purging of the spacecraft and the payloads to ensure no dust particle even the size of a micron settles on them.