ADITYA L1 MISSION Syllabus GS Paper 3 - Sci & Tech)
Context: The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) recently said that the first ever full-disk images of the Sun had been captured by India’s Aditya-L1 Mission.
Aditya-L1 Mission
- About: It is the country’s first dedicated solar mission. It is a fully indigenous effort with the participation of national institutions.
oChina, Japan, the US and European countries have similar missions that investigate solar flares, coronal mass ejections and the sun’s magnetic fields.
- Aim: The mission aims to study the Sun from a halo orbit around first Sun-earth Lagrangian point (L1), which is located roughly 1.5 million km from Earth.
oLagrange points are positions in space where objects sent there tend to stay put. At Lagrange points, the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them.
oThere are five points in any two-body system like this, where the net of all these forces is zero. Among the five Lagrange points, L1 is the most favoured to get an unhindered view of the Sun.
- Payloads: The spacecraft carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle and magnetic field detectors.
