After 17 days of circling Earth, India’s solar observatory Aditya-L1 craft has been slingshot on a long journey towards its destination, 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth. In the wee hours of Tuesday (Indian Standard Time), ISRO issued commands to fire the on-board engines of the Aditya-L1 craft, thereby granting it adequate departure energy to travel on the trajectory that will take it to the Sun-Earth Lagrangian Point 1.
This point is at 1 percentage distance of the 150 million kilometre Earth-Sun distance.
“The spacecraft is now on a trajectory that will take it to the Sun-Earth L1 point. It will be injected into an orbit around L1 through a maneuver after about 110 days,” ISRO said.
Notably, Aditya-L1 is the fifth consecutive Indian spacecraft to be slingshot from Earth’s orbit towards its destination in interplanetary space or towards a celestial body.
As Indian rockets do not possess adequate lifting power to directly offer adequate departure velocity to spacecraft and hurl them to faraway destinations, India uses what is commonly known as the ‘slingshot technique’.
This method has been deployed successfully in missions such as Chandrayaan-1 (2008), Mangalyaan (2013), Chandrayaan-2 (2019), Chandrayaan-3 (2023) and Aditya-L1.
