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After a journey of 127 days, the Aditya-L1 spacecraft, India’s first solar mission, will enter the final orbit today afternoon, its desired destination from where it will make observations of the Sun for the next five years.
The spacecraft has to get into an orbit around the L1 (Lagrange 1) point, one of the five locations in the Earth-Sun system where the gravitational effects of the two roughly cancel each other out. It is a relatively stable point for a spacecraft to be parked, and make observations of the Sun.
However, getting into the orbit around L1 is not the same as attaining an orbit around any other planetary body, and is being considered the most important challenge in this mission. The spacecraft will spend the rest of its mission life “orbiting around L1 in an irregularly-shaped orbit in a plane roughly perpendicular to the line joining the Earth and the Sun,” an ISRO scientist said.