Mission Timeline

Scroll down to follow Aditya-L1's journey — from an Earth parking orbit to a halo orbit 1.5 million km away. Each milestone fades in as you reach it.

2 Sep 2023

Launch

PSLV-C57 lifts off from Sriharikota at 11:50 IST, placing Aditya-L1 into an elliptical Earth parking orbit.

Sep 2023

Earth-bound manoeuvres

A series of orbit-raising burns progressively stretches the orbit, building the energy needed to escape Earth's gravity.

19 Sep 2023

Trans-Lagrangian injection

The spacecraft breaks free of Earth orbit and begins its cruise toward the L1 point.

Sep 2023 – Jan 2024

The cruise to L1

Aditya-L1 coasts about 1.5 million km toward the Sun–Earth L1 point, with a mid-course trajectory correction on the way.

6 Jan 2024

Halo Orbit Insertion 🎉

126 days after launch, a precise burn captures Aditya-L1 into its halo orbit around L1 — its permanent science home.

11 Jan 2024

Magnetometer boom deployed

The 6-metre boom carrying the magnetometer sensors unfurls, completing the observatory's instrument suite.

2 Jul 2024

First halo orbit completed

Aditya-L1 finishes its first full loop around L1 — about 178 days — after routine station-keeping manoeuvres.

6 Jan 2025

Science data opens to the world

On the mission's first anniversary, ISRO releases Aditya-L1 science data to the global research community, with further releases following.

19 Feb 2026

Explaining a storm's dawn-side surprise

ISRO announces that Aditya-L1's particle and field measurements, combined with a global ground magnetometer network, explain unusual “dawn-side” geomagnetic disturbances recorded during the two most intense storms of Solar Cycle 25 — on 10 May and 10 October 2024.

3 Jul 2026

Iron fluorescence in solar flares

ISRO reports that SoLEXS detected “iron fluorescence” — a characteristic X-ray glow at 6.40 keV — across 47 X-class flares in 2024, giving a new way to gauge the height of a flare's X-ray source above the Sun's surface. Published in Solar Physics.

23 Jul 2026

Achievements tallied for Parliament

The government tells the Rajya Sabha that Aditya-L1 has captured the first spectroscopic signatures of a coronal mass ejection's onset (VELC), alongside its flare and space-weather results — a progress report on nearly two years of continuous science operations at L1.

Timeline dates compiled from ISRO, eoPortal and Wikipedia. See References & Credits for attribution.
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