ISRO’s Seven Mega Missions
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced its planned seven mega missions which will be conducted over a period of next 10 years.
The seven mega missions include:
- Chandrayaan-2.
- XPoSat (to study cosmic radiation in 2020) and Aditya-L1(to the Sun in 2021).
- Undefined Missions – which include missions which are still in planning stage namely Mangalyaan-2 (or Mars Orbiter Mission-2 in 2022), Lunar Polar Exploration (or Chandrayaan-3 in 2024), Venus mission (in 2023), Exoworlds (exploration outside the solar system in 2028).
Xposat:
- The X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (or Xposat), is ISRO’s dedicated mission to study polarization. It will be launched launch in the year 2020.
- It will be a five-year mission and will study cosmic radiation.
- It will be carrying a payload named ‘polarimeter instrument in X-rays’ (POLIX) made by Raman Research Institute. POLIX will study the degree and angle of polarisation of bright X-ray sources in the energy range 5-30 keV.
- The spacecraft will be placed in a circular 500-700km orbit.
Aditya- L1 mission:
- It is India’s first solar mission.
- Objectives: It will study the sun’s outermost layers, the corona and the chromospheres and collect data about coronal mass ejection, which will also yield information for space weather prediction.
- Significance of the mission: The data from Aditya mission will be immensely helpful in discriminating between different models for the origin of solar storms and also for constraining how the storms evolve and what path they take through the interplanetary space from the Sun to the Earth.
- Position of the satellite: In order to get the best science from the sun, continuous viewing of the sun is preferred without any occultation/ eclipses and hence, Aditya- L1 satellite will be placed in the halo orbit around the Lagrangian point 1 (L1) of the sun-earth system