Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM)

 About Liquid Apogee Motor: 

• It is a small but powerful engine going by the acronym ‘LAM’ will have a critical role to play in the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) upcoming Aditya-L1 mission meant to study the sun.
• The successful operation of LAM is vital to ISRO’s plans to place the Aditya spacecraft in a halo orbit at Lagrangian point L1.
• Such engines are used for orbital adjustment manoeuvres of satellites/spacecraft in orbit.
• It is developed by the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), the ISRO centre for liquid and cryogenic propulsion in Thiruvananthapuram.

Key facts about Aditya-L1 mission

• It is the first space-based Indian mission to study the Sun.
• It will be launched by the PSLV-XL launch vehicle.
• The spacecraft shall be placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrange point 1 (L1) of the Sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from the Earth. 
• A satellite placed in the halo orbit around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the Sun without any occultation/eclipses. 
• This will provide a greater advantage in observing solar activities and their effect on space weather in real-time.
• The spacecraft carries seven payloads to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the Sun (the corona) using electromagnetic and particle and magnetic field detectors.

Source: Smooth operation of Liquid Apogee Motor engine critical to Aditya-L1 success

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