On August 23, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) completed its Chandrayaan 3 mission, dropping the Vikram Lander and Pragyan rover near the South Pole of the Moon. India is now the fourth country to land on the Moon, after Russia, the United States and China, and the first country to land near it. lunar south pole, the probe has already detected sulfur and oxygen in lunar soil. With this recent success, ISRO is already underway with another mission, and its next target is something bigger: the Sun.
ISRO’s Aditya-L1 spacecraftEquipped with an array of sensors to study solar physics, the spacecraft will launch on a PSLV-C57 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, on September 2 at around 2 a.m. ET. It’s planned.
Aditya-L1 begins a four-month journey to a special point in space. About 932,000 miles away lies her L1 Lagrangian region between the Sun and Earth, where the gravitational forces of the Earth and Sun cancel out. Entering orbit around L1 allows the spacecraft to maintain a constant position relative to the Earth while orbiting the Sun. This maneuver is shared with the NASA-ESA Helioheliospheric Observatory. SohoOnce Aditya-L1 reaches L1 orbit, it will join SOHO, NASA’s Parker Solar Orbiter, ESA’s Solar Orbiter, and a handful of other spacecraft dedicated to studying the closest stars to Earth. .
“This mission has instruments that capture a little bit of everything that all these missions have already done, but that doesn’t mean it replicates the science,” he says. Maria Weber, is a solar astrophysicist at Delta State University, Mississippi, and also runs the state’s only planetarium on the same campus. “We now have more information and data in a new phase of the solar cycle than previous missions have captured.” The Sun goes through an 11 year cycle of magnetic activity. , and the current solar cycle is expected to peak in 2025, corresponding to an increase in sunspots and solar eruptions.
Aditya-L1 will carry seven scientific payloads, including four remote sensing instruments. These include a coronagraph, which creates an artificial solar eclipse to better study the sun’s corona, an ultraviolet telescope, and a high-low X-ray spectrometer, which helps study temperature. Changes in the part of the sun.
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“What excites me is the high-energy component,” says a radio-solar physicist at Rutgers University. Dale Gary. Aditya-L1 will be able to study high-energy x-rays associated with solar flares and other activities in a way SOHO cannot. And with a more stable radiation background for measuring solar X-rays, L1 is a good place for that kind of study, he says. Past measurements made in orbit around the Earth have had to deal with issues such as: Van Allen radiation belt.
Aditya-L1’s ultraviolet telescope will also be unique, Gary says. He measures ultraviolet light, which has shorter wavelengths than visible light. The shortest or extreme UV light near the X-ray spectrum has already been measured by SOHO, but Aditya captures longer UV wavelengths.
This could allow Aditya-L1 to study parts of the sun’s atmosphere that have been neglected, Gary said. For example, the transition region between the chromosphere (the region about 400 kilometers from the sun’s surface) and the sun’s outermost layer, the corona. The Sun begins about 1,300 miles above the surface of the Sun and stretches through the solar system.
Ground-based telescopes can make similar measurements as Aditya’s, but the spacecraft is also equipped with “in-situ” instruments that measure features of the Sun that can only be observed while in space. “It’s taking measurements of the magnetic field where it’s located, and it’s also taking measurements of particles in the solar wind,” Weber said.
Like all solar physics missions, Aditya-L1 necessarily serves two overall purposes. The first is a better understanding of how the sun and other stars work. The second is to help predict its behavior, especially solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Ejections of charged particles and magnetic fields affect the Earth’s atmosphere and can pose a danger to satellites and astronauts. In March 2022, a geomagnetic storm caused by solar radiation swelled the Earth’s atmosphere and knocked 40 of SpaceX’s newly launched Stirling satellites out of orbit.
“We live with this planet, so ultimately we hope to be able to predict its behavior,” says Weber. “We’re always making progress on that, but the only way we can predict its behavior is to learn as much as we can about it.”
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Aditya-L1’s scientific mission aside, its success will bring a new feather to ISRO’s cap and mark another step in the space agency’s efforts to make India a space powerhouse, the paper said. says. Wendy Whitman Cobb A space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force Advanced Aerospace Studies School (she was commenting on her own behalf, not the US government).
“India has had some pretty big plans for the last 20 years,” she says. “Many countries say they will do something, but I think India is a rare example of a country that is actually doing it.”
Space is definitely a challenge. In 2019, ISRO’s first lunar landing attempt using Chandrayaan-2 failed, and there is no guarantee Aditya L1 will reach L1. “It’s a technical achievement to get you on the right track when you reach your destination,” says Gary. “Learning takes time. When they reach their goals and get everything working correctly, it’s going to be a very exciting situation.”
