India's first space solar observatory Aditya-L1 launches Saturday — what you should know

India's first dedicated solar observatory in space, the Aditya-L1, will launch Sep. 2 at 11:50 a.m. The satellite is to be placed in an orbit around a point called the Lagrange Point 1 or L1, 1.5 million km from us on a straight line between the Earth and the Sun. The Sun itself is 150 million km away from us. Jagdev Singh, a professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the principal investigator of VELC (visible emission line coronagraph), the main payload on the satellite, unpacks what we might learn from the data it beams back