/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15712828
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/09/india-aditya-l1-pslv/

> Key science objectives for the mission are to help increase understanding of the phenomena of coronal heating, or how the Sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – has a far higher temperature than the surface of the Sun itself, and study how the corona accelerates the solar wind. Other major objectives include understanding how solar flares and coronal mass ejections are initiated, studying the dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere, and monitoring the distribution and anisotropy (lack of uniformity by direction) of particles in the solar wind.

> Aditya-L1 carries a suite of seven instruments that will be used to study the Sun. The spacecraft was constructed in-house at ISRO and has a mass of 1,475 kilograms. It is expected to operate for at least five years. The main instrument is the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, which was built by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics to study the Sun’s corona and coronal mass ejection events. It uses an internally occulted reflective coronagraph to block direct light from the Sun itself to allow its detectors – including an imager, a multi-split spectrograph, and a polarimeter, to observe the corona.