ISRO’s first solar mission Aditya-L1 was launched from Sriharikota on Saturday (September 2), in another space journey of the country within a span of months.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the ISRO scientists for their efforts behind the project. Various scientists played their part in the mission.
Taking a look at those involved in Aditya-L1
Senior scientist Dr Sankarasubramanian K was assigned by ISRO to serve as the mission’s principal scientist for the Aditya-L1 mission. Dr Sankarasubramanian is a researcher with a focus on solar studies at Bengaluru’s UR Rao Satellite Centre.
He has played a number of roles in missions like AstroSat, Chandrayaan-1, and Chandrayaan-2. Dr Sankarasubramanian served as the Principal Investigator of one of the X-ray payloads of Aditya-L1. He was the leader of Aditya-L1’s Science Working Group.
Two scientists, Durgesh Tripathi and AN Ramaprakash have dedicated the past 10 years to developing the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT), one of the main payloads on the Aditya-L1 mission.
They are from Pune's prestigious Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA).
"It all started in 2013 after ISRO announced its mission to study the sun. I then spoke to my colleague A N Ramprakash, who is also a professor at IUCAA. We began working on the project and wrote proposals to numerous colleagues from different institutes, seeking their collaboration," Tripathi said.
He informed that the spacecraft will take another four months to reach the sun-earth Lagrangian Point, also known as L1.
“Data from SUIT will be available from January,” he said.
He said that the overall objective is to understand the dynamics in the solar atmosphere.
“UV rays are important for the sun-climate relationship because these are absorbed in the earth's stratosphere, in the process significantly impacting the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere,” he added.
Ramaprakash said they were not clear about what they were planning to develop when they began work on the project 10 years ago and several months went into crystallizing the concept.
"What we set out to do was a technologically challenging task and it wasn't clear then whether it was possible to achieve it with the available technology," he said.
"We had to build ultra-clean rooms, and ISRO kindly provided the space for constructing these clean rooms. It took us a couple of years to complete them," he said underlining some of the challenges.
Aditya-L1 will be placed in a halo orbit around Lagrangian Point 1 (L1), which is 1.5 million km from the Earth in the direction of the Sun. It will revolve around the Sun with the same relative position and hence can see the Sun continuously.
(With PTI inputs)
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