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Regarding Aditya-L1, the year 2026 is expected to be like no other.

This marks the initial occasion the spacecraft – which was placed in orbit recently – can observe our star when it reaches its maximum activity cycle.

According to research, it comes roughly once every 11 years as the Sun's polarity reverses – the Earth equivalent could be the North and South poles changing places.

It's a time of great turbulence. It sees our star changing from peaceful to violent and features a significant rise in the frequency of solar eruptions and massive solar flares – massive bubbles of plasma that blow out of the Sun's outermost layer.

Composed of ionized particles, a coronal mass ejection can weigh up to a trillion kilograms and can attain velocities exceeding 2,000 miles each second. It can head out toward various directions, including towards the Earth. At top speed, it would take an ejection about half a day to traverse the vast distance Earth-Sun distance.

"In the normal or quiet periods, our star launches a few solar eruptions daily," explains a leading scientist. "In 2026, we expect them to be 10 or more daily."

Researching coronal mass ejections 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 occurring on the solar surface threaten infrastructure on our planet and in orbit.

Effects on Earth and Orbital Systems

CMEs rarely pose immediate danger to people, yet they impact our planet through generating geomagnetic storms affecting conditions in Earth's vicinity, where about thousands of spacecraft, including many from India, orbit.

"The most beautiful manifestations of a CME are auroras, being direct evidence that charged particles from our star journey to Earth," the scientist clarifies.

"However, they may make all the electronics on a satellite fail, disable power grids and affect weather and communication satellites."

Historical Solar Events

• The most powerful solar storm in history was the Carrington Event which knocked out telegraph lines across the globe
• During 1989, a part of Canadian electrical network failed, affecting six million people in darkness for nine hours
• During late 2015, solar storms disrupted air traffic control, leading to chaos across Scandinavia and some other European airports
• In February 2022, a CME caused dozens of spacecraft failing

If we are able to see events on the Sun's corona and detect solar activity or solar eruption as it happens, record its temperature at origin and watch its path, this serves as a forewarning to switch off electrical systems and satellites redirecting them to safety.

The Mission's Unique Advantage

While other solar missions observing our star, Aditya-L1 has an advantage compared to rivals regarding studying the solar atmosphere.

"Aditya-L1's coronagraph has perfect dimensions that lets it nearly mimic the Moon, completely blocking the solar disk permitting continuous observation of nearly the entire solar atmosphere around the clock, 365 days a year, even during eclipses and occultations," says the expert.

Essentially, the coronagraph acts like a synthetic eclipse, blocking the solar glare to let researchers constantly study its faint outer corona – a feat natural eclipses provide only during specific moments.

Additionally, this is the only mission that can study solar events in visible light, letting it measure a CME's temperature and heat energy – key clues indicating how strong a CME would be when traveling toward Earth.

Preparation for Maximum Activity

In preparation for the upcoming solar maximum, researchers worked together analyzing information gathered from one of the largest CMEs recorded by the mission has observed recently.

It originated in September 2024 at 00:30 GMT. The eruption's weight totaled billions of tons – the iceberg that sank Titanic weighed much less.

Initially, its temperature was 1.8 million degrees Celsius and the energy content was equivalent to 2.2 million megatons of explosives – in comparison nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 15 kilotons in scale each.

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

The space rock which wiped out prehistoric life on our planet carried enormous energy and when the Sun's maximum activity cycle, we could see CMEs with energy content matching even more than that.

"In my view the CME we evaluated to have occurred during periods of typical solar activity. This establishes the benchmark for future comparison assessing what to expect when the maximum activity cycle arrives," he states.

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