The Aditya-1 mission was designed as a 400kg class satellite carrying a single payload, the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), and was scheduled to launch into an 800 km low earth orbit. The project has been accepted, and the satellite will be launched by PSLV-XL from Sriharikota between 2019 and 2020.

Aditya-1 was designed to solely observe the solar corona. The corona refers to the Sun's outer layers, which extend hundreds of kilometres above the disc (photosphere). It has a temperature of more than a million degrees Kelvin, which is far greater than the temperature of the solar disc, which is roughly 6000 degrees Kelvin. How the corona reaches to such high temperatures is still a mystery in solar physics. India's first solar mission, which was delayed from early 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is expected to launch in the third quarter of 2022, at the same time as the country's second space observatory Xposat, which will aid astronomers in studying cosmic sources such as pulsars and supernovae, senior officials from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said. 

At a briefing this week, Dr. Unnikrishnan Nair, director of the human spaceflight centre, stated, 'The solar project Aditya L1 will be launched in the 3rd quarterly of following year (2022) and will reveal deeper understanding into the beginning of the cosmos and several other unpredicted.'

The Aditya L1 spacecraft will be launched 1.5 million kilometres from Earth to L1 Lagrangian, a position between the Earth and the Sun where the gravitational pull of both bodies on the satellite equals the centripetal force required to keep the satellite in orbit. It's like a parking lot in space, and it's ideal for seeing a variety of events without interference from eclipses. 

Aditya-L1 can now give observations of the Sun's Corona (soft and hard X-ray, Emission lines in the visible and NIR), Chromosphere (UV), and Photosphere with further experiments (broadband filters). Furthermore, particle payloads will investigate the particle flux emitted by the Sun and reaching the L1 orbit, while the magnetometer payload will monitor the fluctuation in magnetic field strength at the halo orbit around L1. These payloads would have been useless in low earth orbit due to interference from the Earth's magnetic field.

The other strictly scientific mission that the space agency will conduct next year is Xposat. It will be launched atop a tiny satellite launch vehicle that is still in development. The new launch vehicle is expected to fly for the first time in December of this year. After two successful development flights, ISRO declares a launch vehicle mission-ready.

'Xposat will let us to investigate the polarisation of cosmic occurrences.' It will be launched via an SSLV that is currently in development. The first development flight is scheduled for the end of this year. 'Academicians are excited to see the data gathered by this trip,' Nair added. 

The SSLV, which is being designed for commercial small satellite launches, costs only 30 crore as opposed to 120 crore for a polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV). The SSLV can be constructed in seven days by a team of six scientists, compared to a team of 600 that takes several months to create a PSLV.

The Covid-19 epidemic had a significant impact on the number of launches ISRO could conduct in 2020 and 2021. There have only been four launches in the last two years, one of which was a wholly commercial launch with the main payload being a Brazilian earth observation satellite dubbed Amazonia-1.

Prior to the epidemic, the space agency planned 20 launches in fiscal year 2020-21, including the first unmanned flight under the Gaganyaan mission.The Gaganyaan mission is also expected to begin by the end of 2022 or early 2023.