On Monday, August 28, the ISRO announced that the Aditya-L1 Mission is all set to get launched on Saturday, September 2, from the Sriharikota port of Andhra Pradesh, at 11.50 PM. And after the successful soft-landing of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the south pole of the lunar surface, this solar mission will become another point of immense interest for the whole nation, as this is the country’s first space-based observatory.
Speaking on the same, former ISRO scientist, Nambi Narayanan, interacting with PTI, said that any research, with respect to the planets, stars, and the galaxies, are certainly going to give you certain inputs.
‘We are in the process of learning, and some people are ahead of us in this, particularly the Americans. I do not know whether they have given us all the data available, in the public domain. The same thing is with China, I do not think that China has given all the information. Now, we are in the race, so we will also get data.’, he stated.
He further expressed, ‘Generally, the scientific community is not politics-oriented, with respect to data. So, it is actually shareable. Similarly, the ISA and the NASA, they are supporting you, they are not political organizations. They are scientists.’
Talking about Aditya-L1, Narayanan said, ‘Aditya, I think, means the Sun. I said this particularly because nowadays, we are trying to introduce some kind of politics into everything. Because Aditya can mean something else also, if you look at it in Sanskrit dictionaries. So, I am saying that Aditya was named long back. In a very plain language, if I have to say, this is to study the Sun in a very close contact.’
‘As you know, the Sun is the nearest star to planet Earth, and actually, it is nothing but a hot mixing of helium and hydrogen gases, they are burning and this is the closest star to you, and this is about 150 million KM away from you.’, he added.
