Aditya-L1: ISRO reveals first Indian mission to study Sun by 2020

New Delhi : With an aim to reach a new milestone, Indian Space Research Organisation ( ISRO) will be launching India's first solar mission - Aditya L1 - by 2020.

The approval for solar mission has come and  the satellite will be launched during 2019 – 2020 timeframe by PSLV-XL from Sriharikota, ISRO mentioned on its website.

Aditya-L1 solar mission will be aimed at studying the Sun from an orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point 1 (L1) which is about 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth.

During its course, it will be observing the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun, the corona in different wavebands.

The other prime focus of the mission will be to do coronal and near UV studies of the sun and help resolve some unanswered questions in solar physics.

National Institutions like Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, are developing the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUIT) payload for the Aditya-L1 mission.

Before this NASA-ESA mission SOHO was launched in 1995 to study Sun. But, after the mission was commenced, there have been no satellite imaging the sun from space. Aditya-L1 will be filling the void.