India's 2026 Maiden Sun Mission Ready For Maximum Solar Activity

For Aditya-L1, India's first solar observation mission in space, 2026 is expected to be able to capture significant data.

The Aditya-L1 will be well placed to observe CMEs

It's the first time the observatory - which was placed in orbit last year - will be able to watch the Sun when it reaches its maximum activity cycle. This, says NASA, comes roughly every 11 years when the Sun's magnetic poles flip. This creates a time of great turbulence - marked by a huge increase in the number of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) - huge bubbles of plasma that blow out of Sun's outermost layer called corona and look like fireballs.

Made up of charged particles, a CME can have a mass of up to a trillion kilograms and can reach speeds of 3,000km (1,864 miles) per second. These unpredictable explosions can blast out into Space in any direction, including towards us on Earth. At top speed, it would take a CME just 15 hours to cover the 150 million km (93 million miles) to Earth. The most beautiful manifestations of a CME are, of course, colourful displays of auroras.

Prof R Ramesh of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics says that in normal times, the Sun produces two or three CMEs each day but "next year, we expect there to be 10 or more daily." Prof Ramesh is the principal investigator on Visible Emission Line Coronagraph, or VELC - the most important of the seven scientific instruments on Aditya-L1 - and closely monitors and decodes the data it gathers.

Studying CMEs is one of the most important scientific objectives of India's maiden solar mission, he says. One, because the ejections provide an opportunity to learn about the star at the centre of our solar system, and two, because activities that take place on the Sun threaten infrastructure on Earth and in space.

Whilst auroras are beautiful for us to observe on Earth, they can also make all the electronics on a satellite malfunction, knock down power grids and affect weather and communication satellites. "The learnings from this will help us work out the counter-measures to be adopted to protect satellites in near space. They will also help us gain a better understanding of near-Earth space," says Prof Ramesh.

Aditya-L1 combines the Sanskrit word 'Aditya', meaning 'the Sun', with L1, referring to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 1, a stable spot in space (about 1 million miles from Earth) perfect for uninterrupted solar observation.

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