It’s great or good news for our country that the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully performed the final maneuver to inject the first spacecraft, Aditya L1 on January 6, 2024, and is used to study the Sun into its final destination orbit about 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth. In the year 2024, India creates another landmark that the Aditya L1, ISRO’s first solar spacecraft or observatory reaches its destination. Earlier, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched the Solar Spacecraft Aditya-L1 successfully through PSLV-C57 on September 2, 2023, at 11:50 am from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.

Aditya-L1, Halo-Orbit Insertion (HOI) of its solar observatory spacecraft was accomplished on January 6, 2024, at around 4 pm. According to ISRO, the last or final phase of the maneuver involved the firing of control engines for a short period. Lagrangian Point (l1) is one of the stable points in which the gravitational force between the Sun and the Earth balances the centripetal force felt by a tiny or smaller object such as a satellite.

India’s first solar spacecraft, Aditya-L1’s orbit is a periodic Halo orbit that is situated around 1.5 million km from the Earth with an orbit period of approximately 177.86 Earth days. As per ISRO, this spacecraft mission is an Indian sun observatory at Lagrangian point L1 to understand, study, and observe the coronal and chromospheric dynamics of the Sun.

Aditya-L1 spacecraft is placed in a halo orbit around the L1 point and has several benefits as compared to locating in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) are given below –

• It offers a smooth Sun-spacecraft velocity range throughout the orbit and is suitable for helioseismology.
• It enables the unobstructed, and continuous study of the Sun with viewing of the Earth for allowing continuous communication via message or talk to ground stations.
• It is the outside of the magnetosphere of the Earth so it is appropriate for the ‘’in situ’’ sampling of the solar wind and particles.