Sunshine moment for India: Jitendra hails successful launch of Aditya L1

SRIHARIKOTA: Hailing the successful launch of the country's maiden solar mission — Aditya L1 — Union Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh termed it as a "sunshine moment for India", one that the whole world waited on with "bated breath".

Addressing the scientists at ISRO after the successful lift-off of the launch vehicle carrying seven payloads for solar exploration, the Union Minister said, "This is, indeed, a sunshine moment for India. Our scientists had been toiling night and day for years and years together for this moment. The successful launch of Aditya L1 also testifies to the progress of space science and the whole-of-science and whole-of-nation approach that we have sought to adopt and imbibe in our work culture."

Also congratulating fellow scientists, who were involved in the solar exploration project, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman S Somanath said, "The Aditya L1 spacecraft has been injected in an elliptical orbit, in line with what the PSLV launch vehicle had set out to achieve. I want to congratulate my fellow scientists for ensuring that the launch vehicle puts Aditya L1 in the right orbit."

The PSLV-C57.1 rocket carrying the Aditya-L1 orbiter lifted off successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh at 11.50 am on Saturday. The successful launch of the maiden solar mission of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) came on the heels of the historic lunar landing mission — Chandrayaan-3. The ISRO successfully placed a lander on the unexplored lunar South Pole, a feat that put India in the record books as the first country to do so.

According to the agency, the Aditya-L1 mission is expected to reach the observation point in four months. It will be placed in a halo orbit around Lagrangian Point 1 (or L1), which is 1.5 million km away from the Earth in the direction of the sun. It will carry seven different payloads, which will conduct a detailed study of the Sun.

While 4 of the payload instruments will observe the light from the Sun, the remaining 3 will measure in-situ parameters of the plasma and magnetic fields. The largest and technically most challenging payload on Aditya-L1 is the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph or VELC.VELC was integrated, tested, and calibrated at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics’ CREST (Centre for Research and Education in Science Technology) campus in Hosakote in collaboration with ISRO.

This strategic location will enable Aditya-L1 to continuously observe the sun without being hindered by eclipses or occultation, allowing scientists to study solar activities and their impact on space weather in real time. Also, the spacecraft's data will help identify the sequence of processes that lead to solar eruptive events and contribute to a deeper understanding of space weather drivers.

Major objectives of India’s solar mission include the study of the physics of solar corona and its heating mechanism, the solar wind acceleration, coupling and dynamics of the solar atmosphere, solar wind distribution and temperature anisotropy, and origin of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) and flares and near-earth space weather.

According to the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics, the atmosphere of the sun, the Corona are seen during a total solar eclipse. A coronagraph like the VELC is an instrument that cuts out the light from the disk of the sun and can, thus, image the much fainter Corona at all times