Aditya-L1 to shed more light on present, future of Sun: ARIES director

Scientists expect to get new information about the past present and future of the Sun after analysing the data that will be collected by Indias first solar mission AdityaL1 scheduled to be launched by ISRO on September 2This data is believed to be important to understand possible climatic changes on Earth in the decades and centuries aheadAdityaL1 will go up to the First Lagrangian point about 15 million km from the Earth and transmit the data much of which will come to the scientific community for the first time from a platform in space said solar physicist Prof Dipankar Banerjee who is part of a team which conceptualised the mission more than 10 years agoOur existence or life on Earth is basically because of the presence of the Sun which is our nearest star All energy comes from the Sun It is important to understand whether it is going to emit the same radiation that it does now or it is going to undergo changesIf the Sun does not radiate the same amount of energy tomorrow it will have a very big impact on our climate Banerjee told PTIIf the Sun can be monitored over a long period from the Lagrangian point it is expected to model the history of the Sun that is hitherto unknown to mankind said the scientist who is the Director of Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences ARIES in Nainital an autonomous body under the Union governmentIt has been seen that every 11 years there is a change in the magnetic activity in the Sun which is known as the solar cycle There are also occasional violent changes in the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere resulting in huge bursts of energy which are called solar storms Banerjee saidThe outer solar atmosphere the corona is structured by strong magnetic fields which confines hot plasma At certain times it releases into the interplanetary medium bubbles of gas and magnetic fields called coronal mass ejections he saidWhen they travel in the interplanetary medium they can go in all directions Satellites are directly affected by the impact of the coronal mass ejections Other planetary bodies including the Moon also get affected by solar storms To protect our assets in space prediction of space weather is required The predictions can be improved with the help of data from AdityaL1 he saidThe ISROs spacecraft can also help scientists dig out the hidden history of the Earths climate as solar activities have an impact on the planets atmosphereThere have been many ice ages on the Earth People still do not fully understand how these ice ages were created and whether the Sun was responsible for them he saidAdityaL1 will attempt to get an estimate of the magnetic field in the corona for the first time from a space platformBesides continuous monitoring of near ultraviolet flux from the Sun certain properties of the solar wind expansion of the Suns outer atmosphere that emits particles and some other issues will be done for the first time he saidGroundbased telescopes will also be used along with the payloads of AdityaL1 from the vantage point of Lagrange 1 point to understand the activities of the SunObservations from groundbased telescopes will be combined with Adityas scientific findings to get a comprehensive view of what is happening in the solar atmosphere particularly on the solar storm from ARIES Kodaikanal and Udaipur observatoriesTheir observations will be crucial for a better understanding of the phenomenon he saidOnce the scientific payloads inside AdityaL1 start operations we will be looking for data after the verification phase is over A team will be involved with the scientific data analysis Banerjee saidLagrangian points are where gravitational forces acting between two objects balance each other in such a way that the spacecraft can hover for a longer period of timeThe L1 point is considered the most significant of the Lagrangian points for solar observations which were discovered by mathematician Joseph Louis LagrangeNow we are getting a great opportunity to study the Sun from a fullfledged observatory in space and also from the ground It is a huge jump for the Indian astrophysics and solar physics community This will give us new perspectives new capabilities We are looking forward to it said the senior scientistThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever