The rehearsal for the launch of the PSLV-C57/Aditya-L1 Mission, the primary space-based Indian observatory to check the sun, is accomplished, in Sriharikota on August 30.
| Photo Credit: ANI
Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), the first payload on board India’s first devoted scientific mission to check the sun, Aditya-L1, will be sending 1,440 images of the sun each day to floor stations.
VELC, developed by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, will be capable of observe the corona constantly from the Lagrange level 1 (L1) of the sun-earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from the earth.
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Aditya-L1 is scheduled to be launched by the ISRO on September 2 at 11.50 a.m. from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
“Though Aditya L1 mission will be launched on September 2 there will be a cruise phase of 100 plus days before it reaches the L1 point. Once it reaches that point, the doors will be open from most likely from the first week of January 2024 and we will make continuous observations for using the VELC payload,” Ramesh. R, principal investigator of the VELC payload, informed The Hindu.
Prof. Ramesh added that the VELC payload can be sending 1,440 images of the sun in a day.
Voluminous knowledge
“The VELC payload has been designed in such a way that every one minute we will be getting an image of the sun and we will be getting 1,440 images per day to monitor the activities of the sun. With so much data, the ground segment should be ready to process these images in real time and within a turnaround time of 24 hours these should be sent back to ISRO so that the data are disseminated to the scientific community and the public,” Prof. Ramesh mentioned.
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He mentioned the IIA together with the ISRO centres was able to deal with such voluminous knowledge as all techniques had been in place.
“We need tremendous computing power for which the IIA is ready and all the software are being tested so that with the minimum overlap time the data from the spacecraft will be downloaded at the Indian Deep Space Network in Bylalu from where they will process the L0 data [Level 0] data and send them to the payload operations centre in the IIA which will be processed within 24 hours and sent back to the Indian Space Science Data Centre for dissemination,” Prof. Ramesh mentioned.
Apart from the VELC payload, there can be six different payloads on board the Aditya L1 whose mission life was 5 years.
IIA Director Annapurni Subramaniam mentioned the VELC payload was a very powerful payload on the spacecraft.
“The spacecraft sitting at L1 will take pictures of the sun in various ways so that you can understand more about the properties of the sun as well as the surrounding corona. VELC is a very complex instrument to look at very specific spectral lines,” Prof. Annapurni Subramaniam mentioned.
