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India’s Aditya-L1 sun mission reaches solar orbit

   January 6, 2024
India’s Aditya-L1 sun mission reaches solar orbit


The solar observation mission, launched in September, will conduct a comprehensive study of the Sun.

India’s solar observation mission has reached the sun’s orbit after a four-month journey, the latest achievement for the space exploration ambitions of the world’s most populous country.

The Indian Space Research Organization’s Aditya-L1 mission was launched in September and has a suite of instruments to measure and observe the sun’s outermost layers.

“India achieves another milestone,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a post on X on Saturday. “It is a testament to the tireless efforts of our scientists in realizing one of the most complex and complicated space missions.”

India’s Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh said on social media that the probe had reached its final orbit “to discover the secrets of the Sun-Earth connection.”

The spacecraft has positioned itself at Lagrange point 1, from where it will conduct a comprehensive study of the Sun, focusing on the solar corona and its influence on space weather.

The satellite traveled about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) in four months, just a fraction of the Earth-Sun distance of 150 million kilometers (93 million miles).

Named after the Hindi word for sun, this mission follows India’s recent achievement of becoming the first country to successfully land on the South Pole of the Moon Chandrayaan-3 mission in August last year.

The aim of the scientists involved in the project is to gain insights into the effects of solar radiation on the increasing number of satellites in orbit, with a particular focus on phenomena that impact projects such as Elon Musk’s Starlink communications network.

“Today’s event was all about getting the Aditya-L1 into the exact halo orbit… Many people are interested in understanding this effect. So we look forward to many scientific results in the coming days. A lifespan of at least five years is guaranteed if the fuel remains in the satellite,” ISRO Chairman S. Somanath told reporters in India.

“We definitely need to know more about the sun as it controls space weather,” Manish Purohit, a former ISRO scientist, told Reuters. Low Earth orbit will be “super” crowded in the coming years, he added.

Since the sun landing, ISRO has been sharing regular updates on the mission through posts on X.

The United States and the European Space Agency have sent numerous probes to the center of the solar system, beginning with NASA’s Pioneer program in the 1960s.

Japan and China have both launched their own solar observatory missions into Earth orbit.

But ISRO’s latest mission is the first by an Asian nation to be placed in orbit around the sun.





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