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

Aditya-L1 will attempt to get an estimate of the magnetic field in the corona for the first time from a space platform.

Scientists expect to get new information about the past, present and future of the Sun after analysing the data that will be collected by India's first solar mission Aditya-L1, scheduled to be launched by ISRO on September 2.

This data is believed to be important to understand possible climatic changes on Earth in the decades and centuries ahead.

Aditya-L1 will go up to the First Lagrangian point, about 1.5 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 ago.

“Our 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 changes.

“If the Sun does not radiate the same amount of energy tomorrow, it will have a very big impact on our climate,” Mr. Banerjee told PTI.

If 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 government.

It 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, Mr. Banerjee said.