Why the Year 2026 Is Set to Be a Year Like No Other for the Indian Sun Mission

For India's first solar observatory, 2026 will be truly unique.

This marks the initial occasion the spacecraft – which was placed into space last year – can observe the Sun during the peak of its solar cycle.

As per scientific data, it comes approximately every 11 years as the Sun's magnetic poles flip – a similar Earth scenario could be the North and South poles swapping positions.

It's a time of great turbulence. It sees the Sun transition from calm to stormy and features a significant rise in the frequency of solar storms and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) – massive bubbles of plasma that erupt from the solar corona.

Made up of ionized particles, a coronal mass ejection can weigh of billions of tons and can attain velocities of up to 3,000km each second. It can travel toward various directions, even toward the Earth. At top speed, it would take an ejection 15 hours to traverse the 150 million km between Earth and the Sun.

"In the normal or quiet periods, our star emits two to three CMEs a day," explains a leading scientist. "Next year, we expect them to be 10 or more daily."

Researching CMEs is one of the most important research goals of India's first solar observatory. One, because the ejections offer a chance to learn about the star in the center of our solar system, and two, because activities that take place on the solar surface endanger infrastructure on Earth and in space.

Effects on Our Planet and Space Infrastructure

Coronal mass ejections rarely pose a direct threat to human life, yet they impact our planet through generating geomagnetic storms that impact the weather in Earth's vicinity, where about thousands of spacecraft, comprising Indian satellites, orbit.

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

"However, they may make all the electronics on a satellite fail, knock down power grids and disrupt meteorological and telecom spacecraft."

Historical Solar Events

• The most powerful solar event ever recorded occurred during the Carrington Event that disabled communication systems across the globe
• During 1989, a part of Canadian electrical network failed, affecting six million people without power for hours
• In November 2015, solar storms disturbed flight operations, causing chaos across Scandinavia and various European air hubs
• Recently in 2022, a CME had led to dozens of spacecraft failing

With capability to observe events on the Sun's corona and spot solar activity or a coronal mass ejection as it happens, record its temperature at origin and watch its trajectory, this serves as a forewarning to shut down electrical systems and satellites and move them to safety.

Aditya-L1's Unique Advantage

While other space observatories watching our star, Aditya-L1 has an advantage compared to rivals when it comes to watching the corona.

"The instrument is the exact size enabling it to effectively simulate lunar coverage, fully covering the solar disk permitting an uninterrupted view of almost all of the corona around the clock, 365 days a year, including during solar events," notes the expert.

Essentially, the coronagraph functions as a synthetic eclipse, obscuring the solar glare allowing researchers continuously observe the dim solar atmosphere – something natural eclipses does only during eclipses.

Moreover, it's unique capable of examining solar events in visible light, letting it determine a CME's temperature and heat energy – crucial data indicating the intensity a CME would be if it headed our direction.

Preparation for Maximum Activity

To prepare for next year's peak solar activity period, researchers worked together analyzing information gathered from one of the largest solar eruption recorded by the mission has observed recently.

This event began in September 2024 at 00:30 GMT. The eruption's weight totaled billions of tons – for comparison that sank Titanic was 1.5 million tonnes.

Initially, its temperature reached extreme levels with energy equivalent comparable to 2.2 million megatons of explosives – relative to the atomic bombs used in Japan were 15 kilotons in scale each.

Even though the numbers seem incredibly large, the expert classifies it as a moderate event.

The space rock that eliminated the dinosaurs on Earth was 100 million megatons and when solar peak occurs, there may be CMEs carrying power equal to even more than that.

"I consider the CME we evaluated to have occurred when the Sun was in the normal activity phase. This establishes the standard for future comparison assessing what is in store when the maximum activity cycle arrives," he says.

"The insights gained will assist in work out the countermeasures to implement safeguarding spacecraft in near space. Additionally, they'll aid achieving deeper knowledge of near-Earth space," he concludes.