Aditya L1, India’s first mission to study the Sun, took pictures of itself as well as the Earth and the Moon from the high elliptical orbit around Earth where it currently resides.
“Onlooker! Aditya-L1, destined for the Sun-Earth L1 point, takes a selfie and images of the Earth and the Moon,” the space agency informed in a tweet on Thursday morning.
The video posted by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) shows an image of a portion of the spacecraft captured by its onboard camera. It features the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) which will study the solar corona, including the very inner layers not studied by other missions, and the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) which will study different layers of the solar atmosphere in the short UV wavelengths that cannot be detected from Earth.
The video also shows an image of the Earth’s hemisphere illuminated by sunlight, as well as a small white spot that the space agency was supposed to indicate is the Moon.
