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ISRO has informed that the India’s first mission to study the Sun, Aditya-L1 spacecraft, has taken a selfie and the images of the Earth and the Moon. The images have been taken from an extremely elliptical orbit where the Aditya-L1 spacecraft is currently stationed.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), ISRO said, “Onlooker! Aditya-L1, destined for the Sun-Earth L1 point, takes a selfie and images of the Earth and the Moon.”
The video taken by the solar spacecraft has been uploaded by ISRO on on the social media platform X. The video shows an image of a portion of the spacecraft captured by its on-board camera. It also shows the image of one hemisphere of Earth illuminated by sunlight as well as a tiny white dot floating in the empty space that ISRO identifies as the Moon.
The Aditya-L1, India’s space based solar observatory was orbited in low earth orbit (LEO) on September 2 by an Indian rocket called Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle -XL (PSLV-XL) variant. The spacecraft’s orbit has been raised by ISRO twice since then.
As the spacecraft travels towards Lagrange Point (L1), it will exit the earth’s gravitational Sphere of Influence (SOI). After the exit from SOI, the cruise phase will start and eventually the spacecraft will be injected into a large halo orbit around the L1 — the point where the gravitational pull of two large bodies — Sun and Earth — will be equal and hence the spacecraft will not gravitate towards any one of the heavenly bodies.
The total travel time from launch to L1 would take about four months for Aditya-L1 and the distance will be about 1.5 million km from the Earth.
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