Why 2026 will be a year like no other for India’s Sun mission

The year 2026 is expected to be an unprecedented year for Aditya-L1, India’s first solar observation mission in space.

The observatory, placed in orbit last year, will for the first time be able to monitor the Sun when it reaches its maximum activity cycle.

According to NASA, the Sun’s magnetic poles change approximately every 11 years; The equivalent on Earth is the North and South poles switching positions.

A period of great turmoil. It sees the Sun transition from calm to stormy, with a huge increase in the number of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – huge bubbles of fire bursting from the Sun’s outermost layer, called the corona.

A CME composed of charged particles can weigh up to one trillion kilograms and reach speeds of up to 3,000 km (1,864 miles) per second. It can go in any direction, including Earth. At top speed, a CME would take 15 hours to travel the Earth-Sun distance of 150 million km.

“During times of normal or low activity, the Sun ejects two to three CMEs per day,” says Prof R Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA). “Next year, we expect these to be 10 or more per day.”

Prof Ramesh is the principal investigator of the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, or Velc, the most important of the seven scientific instruments at Aditya-L1, and closely monitors and decodes the data it collects.

Studying CMEs is one of the most important scientific objectives of India’s first solar mission, he says. First, launches provide an opportunity to learn about the star at the center of our solar system, and second, activities occurring on the Sun threaten infrastructure on Earth and in space.

CMEs rarely pose a direct threat to human life, but they do affect life on Earth by causing geomagnetic storms that affect weather in near space, where there are approximately 11,000 satellites. including 136 from Indiais deployed.

“The most beautiful manifestations of a CME are auroras, which are a clear example of charged particles from the Sun traveling to Earth,” explains Prof Ramesh.

“But they can also cause all the electronics on a satellite to fail, take down power grids, and impact weather and communications satellites.”

The most powerful solar storm ever recorded Carrington Event It disabled telegraph lines worldwide in 1859. More recent events were recorded in 1989, when part of Quebec’s power grid was shut down. faintedIt left six million people without electricity for nine hours. In November 2015, Solar activity is disrupted air traffic control caused chaos in Sweden and several other European airports.

In February 2022, NASA reported He said a CME led to the loss of 38 commercial satellites.

Prof Ramesh says if we can see what’s happening in the Sun’s corona and detect a solar storm or coronal mass ejection in real time, recording its initial temperature and tracking its orbit, this could work as a forewarning to shut down power grids and satellites and move them out of harm’s way.

There are other solar missions monitoring the Sun, but Aditya-L1 has an advantage over others in monitoring the corona, including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory sent jointly by Nasa and Esa (European Space Agency).

“Aditya-L1’s coronagraph is almost full size, allowing it to mimic the Moon, completely covering the Sun’s photosphere and providing an uninterrupted view of almost the entire corona 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, even during eclipses and eclipses,” says Prof Ramesh.

In other words, the coronagraph acts like an artificial Moon, blocking the Sun’s bright surface, allowing scientists to continuously observe the faint outer corona; something the real Moon only does during eclipses.

Moreover, this is the only mission that can study bursts in visible light and measure the temperature and thermal energy of a CME; These are important clues to how strong a CME will be if it heads towards Earth, Prof Ramesh said.

To prepare for next year’s period of peak solar activity, The IIA collaborated with NASA to examine data collected by Aditya-L1 from one of the largest CMEs ever recorded.

Prof Ramesh says the incident started at 00:30 GMT on 13 September 2024. Its mass was 270 million tons; He says the iceberg that sank the Titanic was 1.5 million tons.

Its initial temperature was 1.8 million degrees Celsius and its energy content was equivalent to 2.2 million megatons of TNT; By comparison, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki weighed 15 kilotons and 21 kilotons, respectively.

While the numbers sound incredibly large, Prof Ramesh describes it as “medium-sized”.

The asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs on Earth was 100 million megatons in size, and we can see CMEs with energy contents greater than that during the Sun’s maximum activity cycle.

“I think the CME we are evaluating occurred when the Sun was in its normal activity phase. This now sets the reference that we will use to evaluate what awaits us when the maximum activity cycle occurs,” he says.

“What we learn from this will help us develop countermeasures to be adopted to protect satellites in near space. It will also help us better understand near-Earth space,” he adds.

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