Third earth-bound manoeuvre done, Aditya-L1 on higher orbit

The Aditya-L1 spacecraft which is on India’s first space-based mission to study the sun was raised to a higher orbit early on Sunday after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) performed its third earth-bound manoeuvre.

The new orbit attained is 296 km x 71767 km, ISRO said. During the operation, performed from the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network here, the satellite was tracked by ISRO's ground stations at Mauritius, Bengaluru, Port Blair and the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota (SDSC-SHAR). The next earth-bound manoeuvre, the fourth of the scheduled five, will be performed on September 15, around 2 am.

The space agency had, on Tuesday, raised the spacecraft to a 282 km x 40225 km orbit. Aditya-L1 lifted off from the SDSC-SHAR on September 2. After the five manoeuvres during its 16-day stay (since launch) on earth-bound orbits, Aditya-L1 will undergo a Trans-Lagrangian1 insertion manoeuvre that will open its 110-day journey to L1 (Lagrange point 1), about 1.5 million km from earth. Another manoeuvre will then place the spacecraft on an orbit around L1.

Aditya-L1, carrying seven payloads, is expected to take about four months to reach L1, where the gravitational forces between sun and earth are balanced, facilitating uninterrupted observation of the sun.

The observations will be carried out through visible and spectroscopic channels. Among the mission’s objectives are studying the heating of corona (sun’s outermost layer), solar eruptions, solar wind acceleration and near-earth space weather.

The primary payload on board is Visible Emission Line Coronagraph developed by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru. It has the capability to watch the sun as close as 1.05 times the solar radius which helps explore in greater detail the lower corona where Coronal Mass Ejections are initiated.