Hyderabad: India's first solar mission, Aditya L1 is on schedule to reach the Lagrange point 1 (L1) of the Sun-Earth system on January 6, which will enable the satellite to view the sun without any eclipses, ISRO chief S Somanath said on Thursday.
Addressing Techfest 2023, the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Bombay's annual science and technology event, ISRO chairman S Somanath said, "Aditya L1 is almost there now. Aditya L1 will reach Lagrange point on January 6 at 4 pm. We will have a very controlled burn of the engine of Aditya L1 so that it enters an orbit called the halo orbit."
The Indian Space Research Organisation's solar mission was launched in September this year with the mission to reach the Lagrange point, a region where gravity between the Earth and the Sun will neutralise. Absolute neutralisation is not possible because there are other bodies like the Moon, Mars, Venus, Somanath said.
All six payloads have been tested and "working beautifully", he said, adding all are giving very good data.
"After the insertion the satellite will be destined to look at the Sun forever as long as its electronics inside are healthy and ready to transmit data. We hope to find out a lot of correlation between the solar corona and mass ejection and impact on space weather we are facing everyday," Somanath added.
Earlier Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh informed that Aditya-L1 will reach its destination, Lagrange Point 1, early next month, to be precise, around the first week of January 2024.
On Chandrayaan-3, India's lunar mission, ISRO chairman S Somanath said after 14 days of its contribution of collecting data, the Pragyan rover is "sleeping very well" on the lunar surface. "It is sleeping forever in history. Unfortunately, we were hoping it would wake up, but it did not happen. When we tested the whole system in our laboratory, it was working," he said.
Somanath explained that some systems that worked in the laboratory may not work on the lunar surface due to various reasons like radiation. (With PTI Inputs)
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