"We
are planning to launch in the first week of September," said
ISRO chairman S. Somanath.
WHAT WILL ADITYA-L1 DO?
Named after the Hindi word for the sun, the spacecraft is
India's first space-based solar probe. It aims to study solar
winds, which can cause disturbance on earth and are commonly
seen as "auroras".
Longer term, data from the mission could help better understand
the sun's impact on earth's climate patterns.
Recently, researchers said the European Space Agency/NASA Solar
Orbiter spacecraft had detected numerous relatively small jets
of charged particles expelled intermittently from the corona -
the sun's outer atmosphere - which could help shed light on the
origins of solar wind.
HOW FAR WILL IT TRAVEL?
Hitching a ride on India's heavy-duty launch vehicle, the PSLV,
the Aditya-L1 spacecraft will travel 1.5 million km in about
four months to study the sun's atmosphere.
It will head to a kind of parking lot in space where objects
tend to stay put because of balancing gravitational forces,
reducing fuel consumption for the spacecraft.
Those positions are called Lagrange Points, named after
Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange.
HOW MUCH DOES THE MISSION COST?
In 2019, the government sanctioned the equivalent of about $46
million for the Aditya-L1 mission. ISRO has not given an
official update on costs.
The Indian space agency has earned a reputation for
world-beating cost competitiveness in space engineering that
executives and planners expect will boost its now-privatised
space industry.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission, which landed a spacecraft on the
lunar south pole, had a budget of about $75 million.
(Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Bengaluru; Editing by
Giles Elgood)
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