European Space Agency’s Contribution to ISRO’s Aditya-L1 Solar Mission
ISRO and ESA have collaborated on the Aditya-L1 mission to assess its functionality and difficulties.
ISRO has a series of consecutive missions scheduled, with the most recent one being the Aditya-L1 mission aimed at solar study. The mission’s payload will gather data about the sun, the brightest star in our solar system, from a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.
To effectively gather data from the payload, having a robust communication infrastructure is crucial. In this regard, the European Space Agency (ESA) plays a vital role by offering its deep space communication services. This not only ensures the reception of scientific data from distant locations but also helps in determining the spacecraft’s location and status. Ramesh Chellathurai, ESA service manager, mentioned, “For the Aditya-L1 mission, we are providing support from all three of our 35-metre deep space antennas located in Australia, Spain, and Argentina.” Additionally, the foreign space agency is extending extra assistance from its stations in French Guiana and the UK.
Aditya-L1 Mission:
The satellite is healthy and operating nominally.The first Earth-bound maneuvre (EBN#1) is performed successfully from ISTRAC, Bengaluru. The new orbit attained is 245km x 22459 km.
The next maneuvre (EBN#2) is scheduled for September 5, 2023, around 03:00… pic.twitter.com/sYxFzJF5Oq
— ISRO (@isro) September 3, 2023
ISRO and ESA will collaborate throughout the entire Aditya-L1 mission, which spans over two years of routine operations.
ESA also has the responsibility of validating a dedicated software created by ISRO to precisely determine the spacecraft’s position. This process, known as orbit determination, will be used to ascertain the spacecraft’s location.
But how will the payload be inserted into the Lagrangian point? The term “Lagrangian Point” was coined in honor of its discoverer, the French mathematician Louis Lagrange, and L1 is one of five such points situated between the Earth and the Sun.
The Aditya-L1 mission will make its journey to one of these ‘unstable’ Lagrangian points through a transfer maneuver that spans a period of 125 days.
Regarding their collaboration duration, both ISRO and ESA have been working together since 2022, and they have been actively engaged in evaluating the operations of the Aditya-L1 mission and the development of the associated software.
