India's first solar mission Aditya L1 to reach Lagrange point on 6 January: ISRO chief

Aditya L1, India’s solar mission, will reach the Lagrange point 1 (L1), of the Sun-Earth system on 6 January, ISRO chief S Somanath said, adding that this will enable the spacecraft to view the sun without any eclipses.

“Aditya L1 is almost there now. Aditya L1 will reach Lagrange point on 6 January 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 (ISRO) head said at Techfest 2023, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s annual science and technology event.

The Aditya L1 mission was launched in September this year.

What is Lagrange point?

Lagrange point is a region where gravity between the earth and the sun will neutralise. The ISRO chief said absolute neutralisation is not possible because there are other bodies including the Moon, Mars, Venus.

All six payloads have been tested and “working beautifully”, Somanath 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.

ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission

On India’s lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, the ISRO chief 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 further said some systems that worked in the laboratory may not work on the lunar surface due to various reasons like radiation.