THE VISIBLE Line Emission Coronograph (VELC), one of seven payloads (instruments) on board Aditya - L1, will be handed over to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) at a function here on Thursday. ISRO plans to launch Aditya - L1, India's maiden mission to study the Sun, sometime this year. The objective of the mission is to study the solar corona, solar emissions, solar winds and flares, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) besides performing imaging of the Sun, round-the-clock. In addition to Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, the space agency has mainly collaborated with Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bengaluru, Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune ; Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata. Scientists at the IIA, an autonomous institute funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), have developed VELC. On Thursday, IIA will officially hand over VELC to the space agency in the presence of S Somanath, Chairman, ISRO. The primary goal of the VELC is to track CMEs, trace links between CME plasma and the magnetic field that drive the solar eruptions and solar winds. The other payloads are Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT), Aditya Solar wind Particle EXperiment (ASPEX), Plasma Analyser Package for Aditya (PAPA), Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS), High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) and Magnetometer. Most of these instruments are in their final stages of development, with at least two payloads already in the ISRO's custody for their final testing.
