Topics Covered: Awareness in space.
Aditya-L1 Support Cell:
Context:
Aditya-L1 Support Cell is a community service centre that has been set up to bring all data on board India’s first dedicated solar space mission to a single web-based interface.
- It is a joint effort of Indian Space Research Organisation and Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences.
- It will allow every interested individual to perform scientific analysis of the data.
About Aditya- L1 mission:
- It is India’s first solar mission. It will be launched using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in XL
- It will have seven payloads (instruments) on board.
- It seeks to study the Sun’s corona, solar emissions, solar winds and flares, and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), and will carry out round-the-clock imaging of the Sun.
Significance of the mission:
The data from Aditya mission will be immensely helpful in discriminating between different models for the origin of solar storms and also for constraining how the storms evolve and what path they take through the interplanetary space from the Sun to the Earth.
Position of the satellite:
In order to get the best science from the sun, continuous viewing of the sun is preferred without any occultation/ eclipses and hence, Aditya- L1 satellite will be placed in the halo orbit around the Lagrangian point 1 (L1) of the sun-earth system.
Why do we study the sun and the solar wind?
- The sun is the only star we can study up close. By studying this star we live with, we learn more about stars throughout the universe.
- The sun is a source of light and heat for life on Earth. The more we know about it, the more we can understand how life on Earth developed.
- It is the source of the solar wind; a flow of ionized gases from the sun that streams past Earth at speeds of more than 500 km per second (a million miles per hour).
- Disturbances in the solar wind shake Earth’s magnetic field and pump energy into the radiation belts, part of a set of changes in near-Earth space known as space weather.
- Effects On satellites: Space weather can change the orbits of satellites, shorten their lifetimes, or interfere with onboard electronics. The more we learn about what causes space weather – and how to predict it – the more we can protect the satellites we depend on.
- Safety and preparedness: The solar wind dominates the space environment. As we send spacecraft and astronauts further and further from home, we must understand this space environment just as early seafarers needed to understand the ocean.
InstaLinks:
Prelims Link:
- About the Mission.
- Objectives.
- What are Langrangian Points?
- What are solar winds?
Mains Link:
Discuss the significance of the mission.
Sources: PIB.
