By :Khushhboo Kabra
Why 2026 will be a year unlike any other for India’s Sun mission
For Aditya-L1, India’s first solar observation mission in space, the year 2026 is projected to be like no other.
It’s the first time the observatory – which was deployed in orbit last year – would be able to view the Sun as it reaches its maximum activity cycle.
According to Nasa, it comes roughly every 11 years when the Sun’s magnetic poles flip – the Earth counterpart would be the North and South poles swapping positions.
It’s a time of immense upheaval. It sees the Sun shift from calm to stormy and is defined by a substantial rise in the number of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – gigantic bubbles of fire that blow out of the Sun’s outermost layer called corona.
A CME, which is composed of charged particles, can reach a speed of 3,000 km/s (1,864 miles per second) and weigh up to a trillion kilograms. It can travel in any direction, including the direction of Earth. A CME would need 15 hours to travel the 150 million kilometers from Earth to the Sun at its fastest speed.
“In normal or low-activity times, the Sun launches two to three CMEs a day,” explains Prof R Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA). “Next year, we expect them to be 10 or more daily.”
Prof Ramesh is the main investigator on Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, or Velc – the most important of the seven scientific instruments aboard Aditya-L1 – and closely monitors and decodes the data it acquires.
The Carrington Event of 1859, which knocked out telegraph lines all around the world, was the most violent solar storm recorded. More recent incidents occurred in 1989, when a portion of Quebec’s electrical grid failed, leaving six million people without electricity for nine hours. Solar activity hindered air traffic control in November 2015, causing disruption in Sweden and some other European airports.
NASA claimed in February 2022 that 38 commercial satellites had been lost due to a CME.
There are other solar missions that monitor the Sun, but Aditya-L1 has an edge over others, including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which was launched jointly by NASA and Esa (European Space Agency).
“Aditya-L1’s coronagraph is the exact size that allows it to practically duplicate the Moon, completely covering the Sun’s photosphere and providing it an uninterrupted view of almost all of the corona. 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, including eclipses and occultations”, Says Prof Ramesh
In other words, the coronagraph functions as an artificial Moon, obscuring the Sun’s dazzling surface so that astronomers may continuously examine its faint outer corona, which the real Moon only accomplishes during eclipses.
Additionally, this is the only mission capable of studying eruptions in visible light, allowing it to estimate the temperature and heat energy of a CME – two crucial indicators of how powerful a CME would be if it were headed toward Earth, Says Prof Ramesh
The IIA and NASA worked together to analyze data from one of the biggest CMEs that Aditya-L1 has ever recorded in order to get ready for next year’s peak solar activity period.
It originated on 13 September 2024 at 00:30 GMT, Prof Ramesh said. The iceberg that sank the Titanic weighed 1.5 million tonnes, whereas its mass was 270 million tonnes, he says.
At the time of its creation, its temperature was 1.8 million degrees Celsius and its energy content was comparable to 2.2 million megatons of TNT; in comparison, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 15 and 21 kilotons, respectively.
Despite the fact that the figures seem extraordinarily large, Prof Ramesh calls it a “medium-sized” one.
The asteroid which killed off the dinosaurs on Earth was 100 million megatons and at the Sun’s maximum activity cycle, he argues, we could witness CMEs with energy content equal to even more than that.
