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Regarding Aditya-L1, the year 2026 is expected to be truly unique.

It's the first time the spacecraft – that entered into space recently – can watch the Sun when it reaches its maximum activity cycle.

According to scientific data, this occurs roughly every 11 years as the Sun's polarity reverses – the Earth equivalent would be the North and South poles changing places.

This period of great turbulence. It sees the Sun changing from peaceful to violent and is marked by a significant rise in the number of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – enormous clouds of fire that blow out from the solar corona.

Composed of charged particles, a coronal mass ejection may have a mass up to a trillion kilograms and can attain velocities of up to 3,000km per second. It can head out toward various directions, even toward our planet. At maximum velocity, it would take an ejection 15 hours to cover the vast distance Earth-Sun distance.

"In the normal or quiet periods, our star emits a few solar eruptions daily," says an astrophysics expert. "Next year, it's anticipated them to be 10 or more daily."

Studying CMEs is one of the key scientific objectives for the Indian maiden solar mission. Firstly, because the ejections provide an opportunity to learn about the Sun in the center of our solar system, and secondly, because activities occurring on the Sun endanger systems on Earth and in space.

Effects on Earth and Orbital Systems

CMEs rarely pose a direct threat to human life, yet they impact our planet by causing magnetic disturbances that impact conditions in near space, where about thousands of spacecraft, including many from India, orbit.

"The most spectacular displays of a CME include northern lights, which are a clear example that solar particles from our star journey toward our planet," the expert explains.

"But they can also cause electronic systems aboard spacecraft malfunction, knock down power grids and disrupt weather and communication satellites."

Historical Solar Incidents

• The most powerful solar event ever recorded occurred during the 1859 solar superstorm that disabled communication systems across the globe
• During 1989, a part of Canadian electrical network was knocked out, affecting six million people without power for hours
• In November 2015, solar storms disrupted flight operations, causing chaos across Scandinavia and some other European airports
• Recently in 2022, an ejection had led to 38 commercial satellites failing

With capability to see events in the solar atmosphere and detect a solar storm or solar eruption as it happens, record its temperature at origin and watch its path, this serves as a forewarning to shut down power grids and spacecraft redirecting them to safety.

The Mission's Unique Advantage

While other space observatories watching the Sun, India's spacecraft holds an edge compared to rivals regarding studying the solar atmosphere.

"Aditya-L1's coronagraph is the exact size that lets it nearly mimic lunar coverage, completely blocking the Sun's photosphere and allowing it continuous observation of almost all solar atmosphere 24 hours a day, throughout the year, including during solar events," says the expert.

Essentially, this instrument functions as a synthetic eclipse, blocking the Sun's bright surface allowing researchers continuously observe its faint outer corona – a feat natural eclipses provide only during specific moments.

Additionally, this is the only mission that can study eruptions in visible light, letting it measure a CME's temperature and heat energy – key clues indicating the intensity of an eruption if it headed our direction.

Readiness for Peak Period

To prepare for next year's peak solar activity period, scientists collaborated analyzing information gathered from one of the largest CMEs recorded by the mission has recorded until now.

This event began on 13 September 2024 at 00:30 GMT. Its mass was 270 million tonnes – for comparison that sank Titanic weighed much less.

At origin, the heat reached extreme levels with energy equivalent comparable to 2.2 million megatons of TNT – relative to the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much smaller and 21 kilotons respectively.

Even though these figures seem massive, the scientist describes it as a moderate event.

The space rock which wiped out prehistoric life on Earth carried enormous energy and during solar peak occurs, we could see eruptions carrying power matching even more than that.

"In my view this eruption we evaluated to have occurred during periods of typical solar activity. Now this sets the benchmark that we'll be using to evaluate what to expect when the maximum activity cycle arrives," he states.

"The learnings from this will help us work out the countermeasures to be adopted to protect spacecraft in near space. They will also help us gain a better understanding of near-Earth space," he concludes.