Chennai, Jan 27 (UNI) With the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
planning its first Sun mission in the June-July window, that will end in August,
the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru handed over the Visible
Line Emission Coronagraph (VELC) payload for Aditya-L1 mission to ISRO.
It was handed over at a ceremony held yesterday at the Centre for Research
and Education in Science and Technology (CREST) Campus, Hosakote, near
Bengaluru.
VELC payload was designed and realised at CREST campus.
The payload was handed over to Director, U R Rao Satellite Centre (USRC)
by Director, IIA in the presence of Chairman, ISRO/Secretary, Department
of Space S Somanth in the presence of Project Aditya-L1 Mission Director
Ms NigarShaji and VEKC Principal Investigator Dr. B Raghavendra Prasad.
The payload would be integrated to the satellite at URSC.
VELC has a mechanism to occult the solar disc to separate and discards
the light from the disk.The light from the Corona is captured by the
coronagraph for further processing. VELC aims to collect the data for
solving how the temperature of the corona can reach about a million
degrees while the Sun’s surface itself stays just over 6,000 Deg C.
For this, the payload targets at the continuous observations of the
Corona, right from its lowermost boundary upwards after having
discarded the bright light from the solar disc.
VELC weighs 90 kg and is 1.7 m x 1.1 m x 0.7 m in dimension, ISRO said
on Friday.
The spacecraft will be placed in a halo orbit around the first Lagrange point,
L1, of the Sun-Earth system. A satellite around the L1 point has the major
advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without occultation/eclipses.
This position provides a greater advantage of observing solar activities
continuously.
Aditya-L1 carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere,
and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and
particle detectors. Four payloads directly view the Sun from the unique vantage
point of L1, and the remaining three payloads carry out in-situ studies of particles
and fields at the Lagrange point L1.
ISRO is planning to launch the Aditya-L1 mission by June or July this year. Aditya-L1
is the first Indian space mission to observe the Sun and the solar corona.
ISRO Chairman S. Somanath, speaking at the handover ceremony of the VELC payload
said the Aditya-L1 mission will be launched by June or July as the launch window for
the mission would close by August.
Following the handover of the VELC payload, the ISRO will now conduct further testing
of VELC and its eventual integration with the Aditya-L1 spacecraft.
“This is the main instrument (VELC payload) on board the Aditya-L1 satellite. There are
also other instruments which are developed by the ISRO and other institutions. Currently,
we are getting ready with the satellite.
The payload will be taken to the U.R. Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, where we will
integrate it with the Aditya-L1 satellite which will undergo a lot of testing, evaluation and
finally, it will be launched using the PSLV,” Somanath added.
Raghavendra Prasad, Principal Investigator, VELC payload, said that the payload will
be able to observe the corona continuously and the data provided by it is expected to
answer many outstanding problems in the field of solar astronomy.
“No other solar coronagraph in space has the ability to image the solar corona as close
to the solar disk as VELC can. It can image it as close as 1.05 times the solar radius. It
can also do imaging, spectroscopy, and polarimetry at the same time, and can take
observations at a very high resolution (level of detail) and many times a second,”
Prof. Prasad said.
UNI GV 2013