In the case of Aditya-L1, the first time India will have a solar (sun) observation mission in space, the year 2026 should be like no other.
It is also the first time that the observatory that was put in orbit last year will be in a position to observe the Sun at the time when it experiences the best activity cycle.
Stated by Nasa, it occurs approximately once in 11 years when the magnetic poles of the Sun are reversed – the same thing happened to the Earth where the North Pole and the South pole reversed.
It is the period of great earthquake. It observes the Sun being calm and changing to storminess and is characterized by a gigantic surge in the occurrence of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – vast bubbles of fire that eject off the outermost layer of the Sun known as corona.
Having a mixture of charged particles, a CME may have a mass of up to one trillion kilograms and may even travel at a rate of 3,000km (1,864 miles) in one second. It has the ability to go anywhere including in the direction of the earth. A CME would require 15 hours to travel the 150 million km distance between the earth and the sun at top speed.
During the normal or low activity periods, the Sun emits two or three CMEs each day according to Prof R Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA). On a daily basis, they are projected to be 10 or more next year.
The main researcher of Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, or Velc – the most significant of the seven scientific instruments on Aditya-L1 is Prof Ramesh, and is the most concerned with monitoring and decoding the information that it collects.
He says that the most significant scientific aim of the maiden solar mission of India is the study of CMEs. One, as the ejections create a chance to know more about the star in the heart of our solar system, and two, the activities which occur on the Sun endanger both the Earth and space infrastructure.
CMEs are hardly ever life threatning however they do have an impact on life on our earth through the geomagnetic storms they cause which directly spread to the near space atmosphere with almost 11000 satellites of which 136 are Indian defaulting.
The most beautiful forms of a CME are aurora, which is a good illustration that particles charged in the Sun are travelling towards the earth.
Although, they can also put all the electronics in a satellite out of order, disrupt power grids and interfere with weather and communications satellites.
The biggest solar storm that was ever witnessed in history was the Carrington Event in 1859, which outpaced the telegraph lines of the world. Events even more recent have been captured with reference to 1989 where this was done by knocking out part of the power grid in Quebec leaving six million people without power in nine hours. November 2015 in Sweden and in certain other European airports, chaos caused by a solar activity disrupted air traffic control.
According to a report in February 2022 by Nasa 38 commercial satellites were lost due to a CME.
Prof Ramesh explains that in the event that we can observe what is happening on the corona of the Sun, and that we can detect a solar storm or what is called a coronal mass ejection, in real time, take a reading of the temperature of the eruption and trace its path master of the consequences, then it can also serve as practice by turning power grids and satellites off and getting them out of harmway.
It is not the only solar mission that monitors the Sun, but Aditya-L1 is in a better position than the others such as the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a mission sent jointly by the Nasa and the Esa (European Space Agency) when it comes to observing the corona.
The coronagraph in Aditya-L1 has the same size, which enables it to resemble the Moon almost completely, entirely covering the photosphere of the Sun, and in this way, it would effectively get an unbroken view of nearly all the corona 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, even during eclipses and occultations.
That is, the coronagraph is a kind of artificial Moon, blocking the sun onto the direct bright surface to enable scientists to see at all times the faint outer corona of the sun, whereas the real moon can only see its own outer corona during eclipses.
Besides, it is the only mission that is able to observe eruptions in visible light, which allows it to measure the temperature and heat energy of a CME an important indication of how intense a CME would be, had it been moving towards Earth, according to Prof Ramesh.
The IIA partnered with Nasa to analyze the data collected by it during one of the strongest CMEs ever to have occurred until now as it prepared the next year of peak solar activity onslaught.
Prof Ramesh says that it came into being on 13 September 2024, 00:30 GMT. It weighed 270 million tonnes – he says the iceberg that sunk Titanic was 1.5 million tonnes.
When it was made, it had a temperature of 1.8 million degrees Celsius and a similar amount of energy as 2.2 million megatons of TNT – and the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bomb were 15 kilotons and 21 kilotons, respectively.
Although the figures make it so big, Prof Ramesh speaks of it as a medium-sized one.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs on earth was 100 million megatons and in the maximum cycle of the Sun, as he says, we might witness CMEs with equivalent energy content which is even greater.
I believe that the CME that we observed happened during the period when the Sun was in normal activity. That is now establishing the standard that we will be working on to determine what is to come when the peak activity cycle takes place, he says.
The lessons learnt about this will guide us in the process of estimating the countermeasures to be taken to secure satellites in near space. They will too serve to give us a better idea of the near-Earth space, says he.
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