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Regarding Aditya-L1, the year 2026 will be like no other.

It's the first time the spacecraft – which was placed into space last year – will be able to watch our star when it reaches its maximum activity cycle.

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

This period marked by intense activity. It sees our star changing from calm to stormy and features a huge increase in the frequency of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – massive bubbles of fire that blow out of the Sun's outermost layer.

Made up of ionized particles, a coronal mass ejection may have a mass up to a trillion kilograms and can attain a speed of up to 3,000km per second. It can travel toward various directions, even toward the Earth. At top speed, it would take an ejection 15 hours to traverse the vast distance Earth-Sun distance.

"In the normal or low-activity times, our star launches two to three CMEs a day," says an astrophysics expert. "In 2026, it's anticipated them to be over ten each day."

Studying CMEs ranks among the most important research goals of India's first solar observatory. One, because the ejections offer a chance to study the star in the center of our planetary system, and secondly, because activities that take place on the solar surface threaten infrastructure on Earth and in space.

Impacts on Earth and Space Infrastructure

Coronal mass ejections rarely pose a direct threat to people, but they do affect life on Earth through generating magnetic disturbances that impact the weather in Earth's vicinity, where nearly 11,000 satellites, comprising many from India, orbit.

"The most spectacular manifestations of a CME are auroras, being a clear example that solar particles from Sun are travelling toward our planet," the expert clarifies.

"However, they may cause electronic systems on a satellite fail, knock down power grids and affect weather and communication satellites."

Past Solar Incidents

• The strongest solar storm in history occurred during the Carrington Event which knocked out telegraph lines across the globe
• In 1989, sections of Canadian electrical network was knocked out, affecting six million people in darkness for hours
• During late 2015, solar storms disturbed flight operations, leading to chaos across Scandinavia and various European air hubs
• In February 2022, a CME caused dozens of spacecraft being lost

With capability to observe events in the solar atmosphere and detect 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 shut down power grids and spacecraft and move them out of harm's way.

The Mission's Unique Advantage

While other solar missions watching our star, India's spacecraft holds an edge over others regarding studying the solar atmosphere.

"Aditya-L1's coronagraph has perfect dimensions that lets it effectively simulate the Moon, fully covering the solar disk permitting an uninterrupted view of almost all solar atmosphere 24 hours a day, throughout the year, including during solar events," notes the researcher.

In other words, this instrument acts like an artificial Moon, obscuring the Sun's bright surface to let researchers constantly study the dim solar atmosphere – something natural eclipses provide only during eclipses.

Moreover, this is the only mission that can study solar events in visible light, enabling it to determine a CME's temperature and thermal output – key clues that show the intensity of an eruption when traveling our direction.

Readiness for Maximum Activity

To prepare for the upcoming peak solar activity period, scientists worked together analyzing information obtained from a major CMEs recorded by the mission has observed recently.

This event began on 13 September 2024 at 00:30 GMT. The eruption's weight was 270 million tonnes – the iceberg that struck the ship was 1.5 million tonnes.

Initially, its temperature reached extreme levels with energy equivalent comparable to millions of tons of explosives – in comparison the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 15 kilotons in scale respectively.

Even though these figures make it sound incredibly large, the expert describes it as a "medium-sized" one.

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

"In my view this eruption we analyzed to have occurred during periods was in the normal activity phase. This establishes the standard that we'll be using to evaluate what is in store when the maximum activity cycle arrives," he states.

"The insights from this will assist in developing the countermeasures to implement safeguarding spacecraft in orbit. Additionally, they'll aid achieving a better understanding of our space environment," he concludes.