The Aditya L1 mission will work closely with the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Proba-3 mission to conduct solar observations beginning in the second quarter of 2025.
India launched its first mission to study the Sun in September 2023, and Aditya has been working at the Lagrange point (L1), approximately 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, since January of this year. Last week, the Indian Aerospace Research Council (Isro) completed the ESA-built Proba-3 program. It is the first space mission to include two satellites designed to fly in formation to simulate a solar eclipse, allowing researchers to study the solar corona.
Aditya L1 and Proba-3 share a coronagraph, which is equipment designed to obscure the sun’s brilliant radiation while allowing astronomers to view and analyze its perimeter, neighboring features, or objects. The Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) is on board Aditya, while Proba-3 houses the Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun (ASPIICS).
ASPIICS provides a field of vision between the Sun’s outer and inner coronas, a circular belt that is typically visible during solar eclipses. It is fitted with a 1.4-metre-diameter occulting disk. This effectively means that ASPIICS will allow for a closer look at this belt, which had previously been 3 solar radii wide.
Proba-3’s Science Working Team (SWT) met in Chennai last week, with Indian and ESA solar physicists attending. During the day-long gathering, ideas about scientific collaborations took center stage, with proposals for collaborative solar observation programs between Aditya and Proba-3.
“Proba-3 has a time frame for observations. We would prefer to perform particular observation campaigns during coronagraphic observation periods. It will help both ESA and the Indian scientific community,” Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram, who headed the Indian delegation to the SWT meeting.