Aditya-L1 Sun Mission Payload To Send 1,440 Images Per Day

India: The Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), the primary payload of Aditya L1 – the first space based Indian mission to study the Sun, set for launch on Saturday – will be sending 1,440 images per day to the ground station for analysis on reaching the intended orbit.

VELC, “the largest and technically most challenging” payload on Aditya-L1, was integrated, tested, and calibrated at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics’s (IIA) CREST (Centre for Research and Education in Science Technology) campus in Hoskote near here with substantial collaboration with ISRO. Aditya-L1 will be launched by PSLV-C57 rocket on September 2 at 11:50 AM. It carries seven payloads to study the Sun, four of which will observe the light from the Sun and the remaining three will measure insitu parameters of the plasma and magnetic fields.

Aditya-L1 will be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrangian Point 1 (L1), which is 1.5 million km from the Earth in the direction of the Sun. It will revolve around the Sun with the same relative position and hence can see the Sun continuously.

“From the continuum channel, which is the imaging channel, an image will come — one image per minute. So approximately 1,440 images for 24 hours, we will be receiving at the ground station,” Aditya L1 Project Scientist and Operation Manager for VELC Dr Muthu Priyal said.

She said, IIA will host the VELC Payload Operations Centre (POC), which will receive raw data from ISRO’s Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC), process them further to make it suitable for scientific analysis, and send it back to ISSDC for dissemination.

“Also a unique software has been developed by IIA to detect automatically the occurrence of coronal mass ejection and the time it happened, which will be provided to science community within 24 hours — whether it is directed towards the earth or whether it is a very energetic event, if the speed is high, will it hit the earth or not, etc — all those information will be made available,” she added.