VELC payload aboard Aditya-L1 will send 1,440 images of sun in a day

IIA's VELC payload on Aditya-L1 mission will send 1,440 images of the sun daily. It will observe the corona from L1, 1.5 million km from Earth. It will be launched on Sept 2 & data will be processed in 24 hrs. VELC is the most important payload & mission life is 5 yrs.

Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), the primary payload on board India’s first dedicated scientific mission to study the sun, Aditya-L1, will be sending 1,440 images of the sun every day to ground stations.

VELC, developed by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, will be able to observe the corona continuously from the Lagrange point 1 (L1) of the sun-earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from the earth.

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Aditya-L1 is scheduled to be launched by the ISRO on September 2 at 11.50 a.m. from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

“Though Aditya L1 mission will be launched on September 2 there will be a cruise phase of 100 plus days before it reaches the L1 point. Once it reaches that point, the doors will be open from most likely from the first week of January 2024 and we will make continuous observations for using the VELC payload,” Ramesh. R, principal investigator of the VELC payload, told The Hindu.

Prof. Ramesh added that the VELC payload would be sending 1,440 images of the sun in a day.

“The VELC payload has been designed in such a way that every one minute we will be getting an image of the sun and we will be getting 1,440 images per day to monitor the activities of the sun. With so much data, the ground segment should be ready to process these images in real time and within a turnaround time of 24 hours these should be sent back to ISRO so that the data are disseminated to the scientific community and the public,” Prof. Ramesh said.