India is gearing up for its first-ever mission to study the sun, expected to launch in early September.
The observatory, called Aditya-L1 ("Aditya" means "sun" in Sanskrit), has arrived at its launch site on the island of Sriharikota, on India's east coast.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India's national space agency operating this mission, shared the first pictures of the spacecraft on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Aug. 13.
While the sun has been studied for a long time, scientists are still puzzled by how its outermost atmospheric layer, known as the corona, gets so hot — about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees Celsius) hotter than the sun's surface. Researchers know little about what exactly unfolds on the sun before it unleashes solar flares and huge plasma clouds called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) into space — and at times toward Earth — and how CMEs accelerate to tremendous speeds close to the sun's disk.
Scientists are hoping the Aditya-L1 observatory will provide some clues into these decades-long mysteries.
Continue Reading.
113 notes
·
View notes
2 September 2022
Fresh off its success at the moon, India is now headed for the sun.
The nation launched its first-ever solar observatory today (Sept. 2), sending the Aditya-L1 probe skyward atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 2:20 a.m. EDT (0620 GMT; 11:50 a.m. local India time).
The PSLV deployed Aditya-L1 into low Earth orbit (LEO) as planned about 63 minutes after liftoff, sparking applause and high fives in mission control.
"Congratulations, India, and congratulations, ISRO [the Indian Space Research Organisation]," Jitendra Singh, India's Minister of State for Science and Technology, said shortly after deployment on ISRO's launch webcast.
"While the whole world watched this with bated breath, it is indeed a sunshine moment for India," Singh added.
The successful launch followed on the heels of another big milestone for India: On August 23, its Chandrayaan-3 mission became the first to land softly near the moon's south pole.
Chandrayaan-3's lander-rover duo are expected to conk out in a week or so, when the harsh lunar night falls at their touchdown site. But Aditya-L1's long journey has just begun.
A long road to a good sun-viewing spot
Aditya-L1 won't stay in LEO forever:
After a series of checkouts, it will use its onboard propulsion system to head toward Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1 (L1), a gravitationally stable spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet in the direction of the sun.
That destination explains the latter part of the mission's name. And the first part is simple enough: "Aditya" translates to "sun" in Sanskrit.
The 3,260-pound (1,480 kilograms) observatory will arrive at L1 about four months from now, if all goes according to plan.
But the long trek will be worth it, according to the ISRO.
"A satellite placed in the halo orbit around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the sun without any occultation/eclipses," ISRO officials wrote in an Aditya-L1 mission description.
"This will provide a greater advantage of observing the solar activities and its effect on space weather in real time."
Indeed, another sun-studying spacecraft is already at L1 — the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission that launched in December 1995.
(Several other spacecraft, including NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, are at Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2, which is a million miles from Earth, in the direction away from the sun.)
Solar flares, the coronal heating mystery and more
Once it's settled in at L1, the solar probe will use four three science instruments to study the particles and magnetic fields in its immediate surroundings and four others to scrutinize the sun's surface (known as the photosphere) and its atmosphere.
This work will help scientists better understand solar activity, including the dynamics of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), ISRO officials say.
Flares are powerful flashes of high-energy radiation, and CMEs are huge eruptions of solar plasma.
Both types of outburst can affect us here on Earth. Intense CMEs that hit our planet, for example, trigger geomagnetic storms that can disrupt satellite navigation and power grids.
(As a side benefit, such storms also supercharge the gorgeous light shows known as auroras.)
Aditya-L1 will also tackle the "coronal heating problem," one of the biggest mysteries in heliophysics.
The corona — the sun's wispy outer atmosphere — is incredibly hot, reaching temperatures around 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius), according to NASA.
That's about 200 times hotter than the solar surface, which is "only" 10,000 degrees F (5,500 degrees C) or so.
It's still unclear what is responsible for this startling and counterintuitive discrepancy.
(Why would it be hotter away from the sun's core, where the energy-producing nuclear fusion reactions are occurring?)
Aditya-L1 has other science goals as well. For instance, the mission also aims to more fully flesh out the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing constantly from the sun, ISRO officials said.
Aditya-L1 will measure the composition of the solar wind and attempt to determine how it is accelerated.
And Aditya-L1 will do all this work on the cheap:
The mission's price tag is about 3.8 billion rupees, or $46 million US at current exchange rates.
That's in the same ballpark as Chandrayaan-3
India's first successful moon-landing mission costs about 6.15 billion rupees, or $74 million US.
For comparison, NASA's most recent big-ticket sun mission, the record-setting Parker Solar Probe, costs roughly $1.5 billion.
This disparity should not be viewed as an indictment of NASA, however; labor costs are much higher in the United States than in India, among other differences between the two nations' economies.
Aditya-L1 is a coronagraphy spacecraft to study the solar atmosphere, designed and developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and various other Indian research institutes.
13 notes
·
View notes
India has unveiled four Air Force pilots who have been shortlisted to travel on the country's maiden space flight scheduled for next year.
The Gaganyaan mission aims to send three astronauts to an orbit of 400km and bring them back after three days.
India's space agency Isro has been carrying out a number of tests to prepare for the flight.
In October, a key test demonstrated that the crew could safely escape the rocket in case it malfunctioned.
After its success, Isro said a test flight would take a robot into space in 2024, before astronauts are sent into space in 2025.
At a function at the Isro centre in the southern city of Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum) on Tuesday, the four astronaut-designates were described as "dreamers, adventurers and valiant men preparing to go into space".
The officers, chosen from the Indian Air Force, were introduced as Group Captain Prashanth Balakrishnan Nair, Group Captain Ajit Krishnan, Group Captain Angad Pratap and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Isro chief S Somanath pinned badges with golden wings onto their shirts and Mr Modi described them as "India's pride".
"These are not just four names or four people. They are four powers who will carry the aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians to space. I congratulate and wish them all the best," he said.
Officials said the men were selected from a pool of Air Force pilots and had undergone extensive physical and psychological tests before being shortlisted.
They have undergone rigorous training for 13 months in Russia and are now carrying on with their gruelling schedule back home. A video screened at the event showed them working out in the gym, swimming and doing yoga.
On Tuesday, Isro also showed a glimpse of Vyommitra - Sanskrit word for "space friend" - the female humanoid that will be sent into space later this year.
The Gaganyaan Mission is India's first human space flight programme for which extensive preparations are underway at various Isro centres.
Named after the Sanskrit word for craft or vehicle to the sky, the Gaganyaan project has been developed at the cost of 90bn rupees ($1bn; £897m).
If it succeeds, India will become only the fourth country to send a human into space after the Soviet Union, the US and China.
Gaganyaan has generated a lot of interest in India, although it's coming decades after Soviet Union and the US started making trips to the low Earth orbit. Both have been in space since 1961. China became the third country to reach space in October 2003 when a Chinese mission spent 21 hours and orbited Earth 14 times. And the US and China have fully operational space stations in low Earth orbit.
An Indian astronaut also went to space as early as in 1984 when Rakesh Sharma spent nearly eight days on a Russian spacecraft.
How important are India's Moon mission findings?
What has India's rover been up to on the Moon?
Last year, India made major forays into space. The country made history by becoming the first to land near the Moon's south pole in August 2023.
Just weeks later, scientists launched Aditya-L1, India's first observation mission to the Sun which is now in orbit, keeping an eye on our solar system's most important and volatile star.
India has also announced ambitious new plans for space, saying it would aim to set up a space station by 2035 and send an astronaut to the Moon by 2040.
3 notes
·
View notes