After Moon, ISRO plans mission to Sun

After the Chandrayaan-I moon odyssey, it's 'Mission Sun' for the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Scientists at ISRO are in the advanced stage of designing a spacecraft, named 'Aditya', to study the outermost region of the Sun called corona.

"That's a mini satellite. In fact, the design is just getting completed," ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair told PTI.

Chandrayaan
"During solar maxim...which is happening...we would like to see the type of emissions which are taking place in the Sun and how it interacts with the ionosphere and atmosphere and so on," he said.

According to Dr Jayati Datta, deputy programme director, Space Science Office, ISRO, Aditya is the first space basedSolar Coronagraph intended to study corona.

'Aditya' would be the first attempt by the Indian scientific community to unravel the mysteries associated with coronal heating, coronal mass ejections and the associated space weather processes and study of these would provide important information on the solar activity conditions, she said.

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"A basic understanding of the physical processes and continuous monitoring would help in taking necessary steps towards protecting ISRO's satellites either by switching them off or putting them on a stand-by mode as warranted by the background conditions," Datta aaid.

The temperature of the solar corona goes beyond a million degrees. From the Earth, corona can be seen only during total solar eclipses, mainly due to the bright solar disc and the scattering of the sunlight by the Earth's atmosphere. One has to go beyond the atmosphere to be able to mask the bright solar disc and study the corona.

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The space borne coronagraph 'Aditya' in would study the Coronal Mass Ejection and consequently the crucial physical parameters for space weather such as the coronal magnetic field structures, evolution of the coronal magnetic field etc, Datta said.

"Completely new information on the velocity fields and their variability in the inner corona, having an important bearing on the unsolved problem of heating of the Corona, would be obtained," she explained.

Activities towards 'Aditya Mission' have been initiated with the involvement of scientists from ISRO centres and prime national research institutes in the country.

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ISRO is planning to launch 'Aditya Mission' during the next high solar activity period. However, the exact date/time is not yet confirmed. "Aditya' is an indigenous/Indian mission. So far, there is no plan of putting any foreign payload on board Aditya mission," Datta said, adding that the United States, the European Space Agency and Japan [Images] have flown missions to study Sun and solar corona/activities.

The sun, which is highly turbulent and dynamic, sends out large chunks of charged particles and emits highly energetic electromagnetic radiation in all directions.

These radiations, on reaching Earth, cause severe near-Earth-space disturbances called Geomagnetic storms, which affect communication links, disturb power lines in high altitudes, cause aurora in polar regions and affect satellite systems directly and also indirectly through changes brought about in the near Earth atmosphere.