Aditya Solarwind Particle EXperiment (ASPEX) onboard the Aditya-L1 mission

Abstract

The Aditya Solarwind Particle EXperiment (ASPEX) is one of the seven scientific payloads onboard the Aditya-L1 mission (the forthcoming Indian solar mission), to be placed in a halo orbit around the L1 Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system, at a distance of 1.5 million km from the Earth, along the Sun-Earth line. ASPEX will carry out the in-situ, multi-directional measurements of the slow and fast solar wind; suprathermal particles and solar energetic particles in the energy range of 100 eV/n to 20 MeV/n. Multi-directional measurements from ASPEX will help in understanding the anisotropy in the energy distribution of particles arriving from different directions. The ASPEX payload will play a significant role in the understanding of the acceleration mechanism and generation of these energetic particles in the interplanetary medium. The ASPEX instrument has been configured as two sub-systems viz. the Solar Wind Ion Spectrometer and the SupraThermal & Energetic Particle Spectrometer. This paper presents the configuration details of both the sub-systems along with preliminary results obtained from the breadboard models.