A benign solar flare is seen in an X-ray image taken by ISRO’s Aditya L1. At the end of last month, another scientific equipment aboard Aditya-L1, India’s first solar observatory, was turned on when it was traveling to the L1 point to acquire an unobstructed view of the Sun.
A “benign” solar flare was seen by the device that tracks the Sun’s high intensity X-ray emissions, ISRO reported on Tuesday.
The spacecraft has been moving toward the L1 point for more than six weeks. It will go 1% of the distance to the Sun, which is the furthest of any satellite built in India.
It was expected that the spacecraft would take around 110 days to arrive at the L1 point after leaving Earth’s orbit in September.
According to an ISRO scientist, “the spacecraft will start braking to get into the orbit around the L1 point in the first week of January.”
The space agency turned on the High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) payload on October 27.
It took its first measurements on October 29 and is presently “undergoing fine-tuning of thresholds and calibration operations.”
The space agency reported that these readings were found to be in agreement with the US Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) satellite.
“This was the instrument’s initial observation. This 10-hour observation yielded the detection of a benign C-class solar flare.
In addition to the solar flare, evidence of these impulsive events that were only marginally visible in the GEOS data was also found by the HEL1OS observation.
