India’s Sun Mission Reaches Milestone as Satellite Begins Studying Solar Winds
New Delhi: India’s ambitious mission to study the sun, called Aditya L1, has achieved a significant milestone as the satellite has now started observing solar winds. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced that the Aditya Solar wind Particle Experiment (ASPEX) payload, carried by the satellite, is now fully operational and performing well.
The ASPEX payload consists of two instruments – the Solar wind Ion Spectrometer (SWIS) and STEPS (SupraThermal and Energetic Particle Spectrometer). While STEPS was activated on September 10, the SWIS instrument was recently activated and has been showing optimal performance, according to ISRO.
To showcase the progress, ISRO shared an image on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that displays the energy variations in proton and alpha particle counts captured by the SWIS instrument over a two-day period.
Aditya L1 mission, which was launched from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh on September 2, has several key objectives. These include studying the physics of solar corona and its heating mechanism, solar wind acceleration, coupling and dynamics of the solar atmosphere, solar wind distribution and temperature anisotropy, and the origin of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) and flares, as well as near-earth space weather.
Apart from the Sun Mission, India is also actively working on a human spaceflight program, with plans to send astronauts into orbit for the first time by 2025.
