January 07, 2025

ISRO has released the maiden set of the scientific data from the country's first dedicated Solar Observatory Aditya L1 to the global scientific community, on January 6, 2025 in ISRO Headquarters, Bengaluru. The day marks the first anniversary of the injection of the Aditya L1 spacecraft to the halo orbit around the first Lagrange point (L1) in the Sun-Earth system. The data were released by Dr. Somanath S, Chairman ISRO/ Secretary DOS, in the presence of a pool of national experts from academia and research institutes across the country, as well as a set of senior students building their careers in solar and helio physics. The maiden datasets from Aditya L1, released on that day, covered the observations from all the seven remote sensing and in situ experiments from the mission.

The data-release event was followed by Aditya L1 payload performance appraisal meeting, which was attended by several scientists working on Solar physics, Heliophysics, space weather and related scientific domains. The status of the mission, along with the major scientific results were presented. The principal investigators of the seven experiments carried by the Aditya L1 spacecraft presented the onboard performance of the respective scientific payloads. These presentations were followed by presentations covering the aspects of mission configuration, payload proposal processing and data archival.

The participants of the national meet included 40 scientists, academicians and students from the Indian academia and research institutes, representing 15 universities and research institutions across the country.

This event marks a major milestone in the roadmap of the country's Solar, Heliophysics and Space Weather research, by integrating the capabilities of the researchers across the country. The brainstorming sessions and discussions showed the way of leveraging the scientific results from Aditya L1 for building India's indigenous space weather research and prediction programme. The discussions included plans to maximize scientific utilisation of Aditya L1 data, integration of the ground-based data and build a holistic understanding of the Sun-Earth connection, as well as ways to enable the scientific community to utilise the science data maximally.

The Aditya L1 datasets will be accessible from the website of the Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC) portal. To access the Aditya-L1 data via ISSDC website, one has to visit https://www.issdc.gov.in/adityal1.html , navigate to data download section. Data may be accessed directly on PRADAN portal links https://pradan.issdc.gov.in/al1 or https://pradan1.issdc.gov.in/al1.ISRO encourages the community of researchers and students to utilise these datasets.