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Regarding India's first solar observatory, 2026 will be like no other.

This marks the initial occasion the spacecraft – which was placed into space recently – will be able to watch our star during its maximum activity cycle.

According to scientific data, this occurs approximately every 11 years when the Sun's magnetic poles flip – a similar Earth scenario could be the North and South poles changing places.

It's a time marked by intense activity. It involves the Sun changing from calm to stormy and features a huge increase in the number of solar storms and massive solar flares – enormous clouds of plasma that blow out of the Sun's outermost layer.

Made up of ionized particles, a CME may have a mass up to a trillion kilograms and reach a speed of up to 3,000km each second. It can head out toward various directions, including towards the Earth. At maximum velocity, the journey takes a CME 15 hours to cover the 150 million km between Earth and the Sun.

"In the normal or low-activity times, the Sun emits a few solar eruptions daily," explains a leading scientist. "In 2026, we expect them to be over ten each day."

Researching coronal mass ejections is one of the key research goals of India's maiden solar mission. One, because the ejections offer a chance to study the Sun at the centre of our solar system, and secondly, since events that take place on the solar surface endanger infrastructure on Earth and in orbit.

Effects on Our Planet and Orbital Systems

CMEs seldom present a direct threat to people, yet they impact life on Earth by causing geomagnetic storms that impact conditions in Earth's vicinity, where nearly 11,000 satellites, comprising many from India, are stationed.

"The most beautiful displays of a CME include northern lights, being a clear example that charged particles from Sun are travelling toward our planet," the scientist explains.

"But they can also make all the electronics on a satellite fail, disable power grids and affect meteorological and telecom spacecraft."

Historical Solar Events

• The most powerful solar event in history was the Carrington Event that disabled communication systems across the globe
• During 1989, sections of Quebec's power grid was knocked out, affecting millions in darkness for nine hours
• During late 2015, solar storms disrupted flight operations, causing chaos across Scandinavia and some other European airports
• In February 2022, an ejection caused 38 commercial satellites being lost

If we are able to see what happens in the solar atmosphere and spot a solar storm or a coronal mass ejection in real time, record its temperature at origin and watch its path, this serves as a forewarning to switch off power grids and spacecraft redirecting them out of harm's way.

Aditya-L1's Unique Advantage

There are other space observatories observing our star, India's spacecraft holds an edge over others regarding studying the solar atmosphere.

"Aditya-L1's coronagraph is the exact size enabling it to nearly mimic the Moon, fully covering the solar disk permitting continuous observation of almost all of the corona around the clock, throughout the year, including during eclipses and occultations," says the researcher.

Essentially, this instrument acts like a synthetic eclipse, obscuring the solar glare allowing scientists continuously observe its faint outer corona – a feat natural eclipses does only during eclipses.

Moreover, this is the only mission capable of examining solar events in visible light, enabling it to determine a CME's temperature and heat energy – key clues that show the intensity of an eruption if it headed our direction.

Readiness for Maximum Activity

In preparation for the upcoming peak solar activity period, scientists worked together to study the data gathered from a major solar eruption recorded by the mission has observed recently.

It originated on 13 September 2024 at 00:30 GMT. Its mass was 270 million tonnes – the iceberg that sank Titanic weighed much less.

Initially, its temperature was 1.8 million degrees Celsius and the energy content was equivalent to millions of tons of explosives – relative to nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much smaller and 21 kilotons each.

Although the numbers seem massive, the scientist describes it as a moderate event.

The asteroid that eliminated the dinosaurs on our planet carried enormous energy and during the Sun's maximum activity cycle, we could see eruptions carrying power equal to even more than that.

"In my view this eruption we analyzed to have occurred when the Sun of typical solar activity. Now this sets the benchmark for future comparison assessing what to expect when the maximum activity cycle occurs," he says.

"The insights from this will assist in work out the countermeasures to implement safeguarding spacecraft in near space. They will also help us gain a better understanding of our space environment," he adds.