ISRO successfully places Aditya L1 in orbit an hour after challenging launch

From the orbit around the Earth, the Aditya L1 spacecraft will slowly be raised by the ISRO team through a series of manoeuvres till it slingshots towards the Sun.

As the Chandrayaan-3 lander and rover continue to collect data on the Moon, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Saturday successfully launched the observatory that will study the Sun from 1.5 million kilometres away. It took nearly 63 minutes for one of the heaviest configurations of the PSLV to place the spacecraft in a precise elliptical orbit of nearly 235 km x 19,500 km.

This was the first time the fourth stage of the PSLV was fired two separate times to take the primary payload of the mission to the precise place for orbit insertion. During the firings of the fourth stage of PSLV and the coasting phase in between, there were two instances — one for nearly 25 minutes and another for just over two minutes — when there were no eyes on the satellite. It was only after a ship-based station and then Kourou ground station acquired the data that the flight path could be seen.