Following Chandrayaan-3’s successful lunar landing, the Indian Space Agency has set the date for its next mission, this time to the Sun.
Aditya-L1, India’s first solar-research space observatory, is preparing to launch at the country’s main spaceport in Sriharikota, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said this week when scientists and crew landed on the moon. He told reporters at the satellite command center as he celebrated the observation. mission success.
“It will be launched in the first week of September,” said ISRO President S. Somanas.
Named after the Hindi word for sun, the spacecraft is India’s first space-based solar probe. Its purpose is to study solar winds, commonly referred to as ‘auroras’, which can cause disturbances on Earth. In the long term, data from this mission could help us better understand the sun’s influence on Earth’s climate patterns.
Recently, researchers from the European Space Agency/NASA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft discovered numerous jets of relatively small charged particles intermittently emitted from the corona (the sun’s outer atmosphere) that shed light on the origin of the solar wind. said it could help.
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft will travel 1.5 million kilometers in about four months on India’s advanced launch vehicle PSLV to study the Sun’s atmosphere.
It flies into a kind of parking lot in space where objects tend to stay in place due to the balance of gravity, reducing the spacecraft’s fuel consumption.
These locations are called Lagrange points, after the Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange. How much do missions cost?
In 2019, the government approved funding worth around US$46 million (roughly Rs.380 crore) for the Aditya-L1 mission. ISRO has not released an official update on costs.
India’s space agency has a reputation for being among the world’s most cost-competitive in space technology, which executives and planners hope will boost the country’s privatized space industry.
The Chandrayaan 3 mission to land a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole cost about $75 million.