Wife of project scientist prays for success of solar mission Aditya-L1
Sep 01, 2023
Shriharikota (Andhra Pradesh) [India], September 1 : As the countdown for India's maiden solar mission Aditya-L1 began on Friday, Keerthi, the wife of a project scientist who worked for Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) payload arrived at Shriharikota to witness the launch.
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath said that it is an important launch and the satellite will take 125 days to reach the L1 point.
"As a wife, there are lots of hardships, so when earlier lunar mission was a failure we were telling people that a lot of people have worked on that...It was sad to hear that because we see they were put through a lot of hardship. We were sad hearing that... So I pray for the success of the event," said Keerthi, the wife of project scientist.
"I am very excited. My husband is a project scientist for Aditya-L1. He worked for SUIT (Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope which is one Payload in Aditya L1. It is his 7 years of hardship. He left for Pune when my son was six months old. We were living in Manipal. Today we have come to witness the launch of Aditya L1," she said.
When ANI asked whether she had interacted with her husband on Chandrayaan 3 launch day, Keerthi said, "He was busy throughout the day. Early morning at 7 meetings would start and go on till 11 at night. I don't think he had shared enough."
Aditya-L1 will be placed in a halo orbit around Lagrangian Point 1 (or L1), which is 1.5 million km away from the Earth in the direction of the sun. It is expected to cover the distance in four months' time. This strategic location will enable Aditya-L1 to continuously observe the sun without being hindered by eclipses or occultation, allowing scientists to study solar activities and their impact on space weather in real-time.
Also, the spacecraft's data will help identify the sequence of processes that lead to solar eruptive events and contribute to a deeper understanding of space weather drivers. Major objectives of India’s solar mission include the study of the physics of solar corona and its heating mechanism, the solar wind acceleration, coupling and dynamics of the solar atmosphere, solar wind distribution and temperature anisotropy, and origin of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) and flares and near-earth space weather.
The atmosphere of the sun, the corona, is what we see during a total solar eclipse. A coronagraph like the VELC is an instrument that cuts out the light from the disk of the sun, and can thus image the much fainter corona at all times, the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics said.
