After moon odyssey, it's 'Mission Sun' for ISRO
BANGALORE: After Chandrayaan-I moon odyssey, it's in a way "Mission Sun" for team ISRO.
Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation are in an advance stage of designing a spacecraft, named 'Aditya', to study the outermost region of the Sun called corona.
"That's a mini satellite. In fact, the design is just getting completed," ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair said.
"During solar maxim...which is happening...we would like to see the type of emissions which are taking place in the Sun and how it interacts with the ionosphere and atmosphere and so on," he said.
According to Dr Jayati Datta, deputy programme director, space science office, ISRO, Aditya is the first space based Solar coronagraph intended to study corona.
'Aditya' would be the first attempt by the Indian scientific community to unravel the mysteries associated with coronal heating, coronal mass ejections and the associated space weather processes and study of these would provide important information on the solar activity conditions, she said.
"A basic understanding of the physical processes and continuous monitoring would help in taking necessary steps towards protecting ISRO's satellites either by switching them off or putting them on a stand-by mode as warranted by the background conditions," Datta Said.
The temperature of the solar corona goes beyond million degrees. From the Earth, corona can be seen only during total solar eclipses mainly due to the bright Solar disc and the scattering of the sunlight by the Earth's atmosphere. One has to go beyond the atmosphere to be able to mask the bright solar disc and study the corona.
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