Aditya-L1 camera takes a selfie with Earth and Moon

The Indian Space Research Organization on Thursday released a "selfie" and images of the Earth and the Moon taken by the camera on-board Aditya-L1 solar mission spacecraft.

"Aditya-L1, destined for the Sun-Earth L1 point, takes a selfie and images of the Earth and the Moon," the Bengaluru-headquartered national space agency said on 'X'.

The images show VELC (Visible Emission Line Coronagraph) and SUIT (Solar Ultraviolet Imager) instruments as seen by the camera on-board Aditya-L1 on September 4, 2023.


ISRO also shared the images of the Earth and Moon as seen by the camera.

India's first-ever space expedition to study the Sun, the Aditya-L1 was launched at 11:50 am on Saturday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC-SHAR) in Andhra Pradesh's Sriharikota.

The solar probe aims to study solar winds, which can cause disturbance on Earth commonly seen as auroras.

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The payloads of Aditya-L1 are indigenously developed with the close collaboration of various centres of ISRO.

Aditya is the Hindi word for the Sun. The spacecraft is designed to travel about 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) over four months to a kind of parking lot in space where objects tend to stay put because of balancing gravitational forces, reducing fuel consumption for the spacecraft.

This is seen as another significant development in India's space ambitions, after becoming the first country ever to land on the south pole of the moon, and the fourth overall to reach the satellite. Russia too aimed to land on the south pole, with a more powerful rocket. Yet, India's Chandrayaan-3 out-endured the Luna-25 to execute a textbook landing.