Which space agency helps India in tracking the Solar Mission Aditya - L1 ?

Question

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Correct — option (2), ESA. The European Space Agency provided the ground-station support for ISRO's Aditya-L1 solar mission, under a cooperation agreement signed between the two agencies in 2021 that also covered Chandrayaan-3. The support came from ESA's ESTRACK network: the three 35-metre deep-space antennas at New Norcia in Australia, Cebreros in Spain and Malargue in Argentina, supplemented by the 15-metre antenna at Kourou in French Guiana and the commercial 32-metre deep-space dish at Goonhilly in the United Kingdom. Their job is tracking, telemetry and command — establishing where the spacecraft is, receiving what it sends and passing commands to it — and the data they collect are routed through ESA's operations centre, ESOC at Darmstadt in Germany, to ISRO's tracking network ISTRAC for analysis. The reason ISRO needs this help is geometric rather than technical. A spacecraft a million and a half kilometres away is visible only from the hemisphere of the Earth facing it, and India's own deep-space antennas can see it for only part of each day; a mission that has to be tracked continuously through cruise, insertion and routine operations therefore needs stations spread around the globe. ESA sells exactly that service, and has done so for ISRO's earlier interplanetary missions as well. One qualification is worth adding, because it is the sort of nuance a follow-up question turns on. India is not without deep-space capacity of its own: the Indian Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bengaluru, built for Chandrayaan-1, operates 32-metre and 18-metre antennas and received Aditya-L1's data as well. What a single site cannot provide is coverage during the hours when the spacecraft lies below its horizon, and that is what a partner network spread across three continents supplies. The support is therefore supplementary rather than a substitute.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) NASA is the obvious guess and it is wrong here. The American agency operates its own Deep Space Network, with complexes at Goldstone in California, Madrid in Spain and Canberra in Australia, and it has supported Indian missions in the past — but the tracking arrangement publicised for Aditya-L1 was with the European Space Agency, under the ISRO-ESA agreement of 2021. NASA remains an important ISRO partner in other areas, most visibly the NISAR earth-observation satellite built jointly by the two agencies, and it is that general familiarity the option trades on.  (c) The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has a real and current partnership with ISRO — the Lunar Polar Exploration mission, in which JAXA is to provide the launch vehicle and rover and ISRO the lander — but it played no part in tracking Aditya-L1. JAXA's own deep-space station at Usuda supports Japanese missions. The option is offered because a candidate who knows there is an Asian partnership in Indian space cooperation may reach for it without asking which mission that partnership belongs to.  (d) The Russian agency — printed here as 'ROCOSMOS', though it is properly spelt Roscosmos — was not involved in tracking Aditya-L1. Russia has a long history with the Indian space programme, from the launch of Aryabhata in 1975 to the cryogenic engine cooperation of the 1990s and the human-spaceflight training arrangements for the Gaganyaan crew, and its own Luna-25 mission was in the news in the same season as Chandrayaan-3. That proximity in the news cycle is what makes the option plausible, and none of it bears on the question asked.

Concept: Aditya-L1 is India's first dedicated solar observatory. It was launched on 2 September 2023 by a PSLV from Sriharikota and placed in a halo orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrange point, roughly 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth in the direction of the Sun, with insertion completed on 6 January 2024. L1 is chosen because the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Earth combine there to let a spacecraft keep station with relatively little fuel, and because from that vantage the Sun can be watched continuously without eclipses or occultations. The satellite carries seven payloads, of which the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, built by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, is the principal instrument: it produces an artificial eclipse so that the faint corona can be studied against the overwhelming brightness of the solar disc. The scientific object is the physics of the corona, the solar wind and coronal mass ejections, which drive space weather and can disturb satellites, navigation and power grids on Earth. Operating at that distance requires ground stations distributed around the world, which is where international tracking support comes in: ESA's ESTRACK network provided it, as it had for Chandrayaan-3, and ISRO's own ISTRAC facilities received the data for analysis.

State PCS 2024 Q91 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q91 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer