Why 2026 will be an extraordinary year for India’s solar mission

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

This is the first time the observatory, which entered orbit last year, has been able to observe the Sun as it reaches its maximum activity cycle.

According to NASA, the sun’s magnetic poles flip approximately every 11 years, equivalent to Earth’s north and south poles swapping places.

This is a time of great turmoil. It witnessed the Sun’s transition from calm to stormy, characterized by a massive increase in the number of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – giant bubbles of fire ejected from the Sun’s outermost layer, called the corona.

CMEs are composed of charged particles that can weigh up to a trillion kilograms and travel at speeds of up to 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) per second. It can go in any direction, including toward Earth. At top speed, a coronal mass ejection takes 15 hours to travel the 150 million kilometers between the sun and the earth.

“During normal or low activity periods, the Sun fires two to three coronal mass ejections per day,” said Professor R Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA). “Next year, we expect the number to be 10 or more per day.”

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

He said that studying coronal mass ejections is one of the most important scientific goals of India’s first solar mission. One is because the jets provide the opportunity to learn about the star at the center of the solar system, and the other is because activity occurring on the Sun threatens infrastructure on Earth and in space.

Coronal mass ejections rarely pose a direct threat to human life, but they do affect life on Earth by triggering geomagnetic storms that affect weather in near space, where nearly 11,000 satellites 136 of them are from Indiahas been stationed.

Professor Ramesh explained: “The most beautiful manifestations of coronal mass ejections are auroras, which are clear examples of charged particles from the sun traveling towards Earth.”

“But they can also cause all the electronics on the satellite to malfunction, disrupt power grids and affect weather and communications satellites.”

The most powerful solar storm ever recorded was carrington events In 1859, telegraph lines were destroyed around the world. The most recent incident occurred in 1989, when part of Quebec’s power grid was eliminatedcausing 6 million people to be without power for nine hours. November 2015, Solar activity is disrupted Air traffic control, causing chaos at Swedish and other European airports.

February 2022, NASA reports Coronal mass ejections resulted in the loss of 38 commercial satellites.

Professor Ramesh said that if we can see what is happening in the solar corona, detect solar storms or coronal mass ejections in real time, record their origin temperature and observe their trajectory, we can serve as an early warning to shut down power grids and satellites and keep them out of danger.

There are other solar missions that observe the sun, but when it comes to observing the corona, Aditya-L1 has an advantage over others, including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agency.

Professor Ramesh said: “Aditya-L1’s coronagraph is precisely sized to almost mimic the moon, completely covering the sun’s photosphere, and can observe almost the entire corona 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, even during eclipses and occultations.”

In other words, the coronagraph acts like an artificial moon, blocking out the Sun’s bright surface and allowing scientists to continuously observe its faint outer corona – something the real Moon only does during a solar eclipse.

In addition, Professor Ramesh said, this is the only mission that can study volcanic eruptions in visible light, measuring the temperature and thermal energy of a coronal mass ejection – key clues about how powerful a coronal mass ejection will be as it moves towards Earth.

To prepare for next year’s peak solar activity, the IIA teamed up with NASA to study data collected from Aditya-L1, one of the largest coronal mass ejections recorded to date.

Professor Ramesh said it originated at 00:30 GMT on September 13, 2024. He said it had a mass of 270 million tons, while the iceberg that sank the Titanic weighed 1.5 million tons.

It had a temperature of 1.8 million degrees Celsius at its origin and an energy content equivalent to 2.2 million tons of TNT – compared to 15 tons for the Hiroshima and 21 tons for the Nagasaki bombs.

Although this number sounds very large, Professor Ramesh describes it as “moderately large”.

He said that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs on the earth was 100 million tons. During the maximum activity cycle of the sun, we can see coronal mass ejections with an energy content even exceeding this number.

“I think the coronal mass ejections we assessed occurred when the Sun was in its normal phase of activity. Now, this sets the baseline that we will use to assess what happens when the cycle of maximum activity occurs,” he said.

He added: “The lessons learned will help us develop countermeasures to protect satellites in near-Earth space. They will also help us better understand near-Earth space.”

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