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Updated: Jul 23, 2019 08:50 IST

Over the next 48 days, scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) will work towards ensuring that the lander-rover on-board Chandrayaan-2 successfully reaches the moon’s South Pole on September 7 at 02:58 am.

However, Chandrayaan-2 is not the only big ticket mission that Isro is working on.

“We have already taken a review today (Monday) to talk about the next mission, the Cartosat 3 mission. We are going to have a series of Cartosat missions this year,” said Isro chairperson K Sivan, after the successful launch of Chandrayaan-2.

Cartosat is a series of Earth observation satellites.

In the first half of 2020, the Isro will attempt a purely scientific mission to the Sun, according to previous announcements by the agency.

The mission to the Sun, called Aditya-L1, will see Isro sending a satellite 1.5 million kms away from the Earth to the L1 point.

The L1 or Lagrangian point, between the Earth and the Sun, is where the gravitational pull of both the bodies on the satellite is equal to the centripetal force needed to keep the satellite in orbit.

The mission had initially been conceived as a satellite in 800 km low earth orbit to study the Corona, or the plasma around the sun, but was revised to go to the L1 point as it allows for an uninterrupted view of the sun.

The revised mission, with six additional scientific payloads, will also study the visible surface of the sun, called photosphere, and the irregular layer above it, called the Chromosphere, along with the Corona which extends for thousands of kilometers and has a very high temperature of around 6,000 Kelvin (5726.85 degrees Celsius).

“The Aditya L1 mission is in an advanced stage. The payloads aboard the satellite will study the radiations emitted from the sun, if there is any pattern to it and whether it can be predicted. It will also study the impact on climate change for an entire solar cycle,” said Dipankar Banerjee, professor at Indian Institute of Astrophysics and a collaborator on the mission.

By the end of 2020, Isro also plans to launch the first unmanned mission to the low earth orbit in preparation for India’s Gaganyaan mission that Isro plans to attempt in December 2021, the previous announcements said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had set the deadline for the human spaceflight programme for Independence Day 2022 during his August 15 address at the Red Fort last year.

The Venus mission, planned for 2023, will be another big-ticket scientific mission for Isro. The mission will study the surface and the sub-surface of the planet, atmospheric chemistry and interactions with solar radiation or solar winds, the agency had previously announced.

Apart from these, the agency also plans to set up its own Space Station in five to seven years from a successful human spaceflight. The Isro chairman had called this the “logical next step”, while making the announcement.