An instrument onboard India’s first sun-studying observatory has officially opened its scientific eyes and sent home beautiful images of our star.
The photographs, captured earlier this week by a payload named SUIT (short for Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope), reveal a handful of features on the sun’s surface, including a couple of sunspots, a solar “plage” and a few silent, inactive areas.
It’s a “lifetime opportunity to conceive an area telescope & get to see its daybreak observations,” Durgesh Tripathi, SUIT’s principal investigator, said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday (Dec. 8).
Related: India’s Aditya-L1 sun probe spots 1st high-energy solar flare
Scientists turned on the instrument on Nov. 20, in keeping with a statement by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which is working the Aditya-L1 solar observatory in collaboration with multiple institutions situated in Ahmedabad, Pune and Kerala.
Aditya-L1 Mission:The SUIT payload captures full-disk images of the Sun in near ultraviolet wavelengthsThe images include the first-ever full-disk representations of the Sun in wavelengths starting from 200 to 400 nm.They supply pioneering insights into the intricate details… pic.twitter.com/YBAYJ3YkUyDecember 8, 2023
The sun, in fact, is a roiling ball of plasma. So somewhat than a solid, rocky surface like Earth’s, the sun’s visible “surface” is de facto a skinny envelope of hydrogen and helium called photosphere. It’s about 62 miles (100 kilometers) thick and residential to sunspots, or dark, planet-size regions of intense magnetic fields from which powerful solar flares blast out. Sometimes, these plasma jets travel toward us, like people who spurred a recent “cannibal” solar storm that initiated gorgeous auroras all over the world.
Aditya-L1’s latest images capture 4 clear sunspots, including one very near the sun’s equator. Our star appears to be calmer to its left, labeled within the image as “quiet sun.” Below the equator, you may notice one other feature called the plage, a highly regarded region often seen within the chromosphere, which is the layer of the sun’s atmosphere above the photosphere but underneath its corona.
The Aditya-L1 spacecraft lifted off on Sept. 2 from India’s spaceport in Sriharikota on a four-month journey to L1 orbit, a vantage point in space roughly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. From this region, the probe can observe the sun constantly and in addition remain somewhat stable through the use of minimal fuel and requiring just a couple of orbital maneuvers.
The spacecraft flung past the sphere of Earth’s gravitational influence in late September; it would reach its final cosmic accommodations later this month or early next. Then, its seven science instruments are expected to start studying how solar wind particles behave after blasting from the sun, while also monitoring our star for upcoming solar flares.
The mission team has began switching on other payloads onboard Aditya-L1 too. Last week, for example, ISRO announced the Aditya Solar wind Particle Experiment (ASPEX) instrument, meant to check the composition of solar wind by in-situ observations, was performing as expected. On Friday (Dec. 8), one other payload designed to observe solar wind was also turned on and declared to be in good health, the space agency said in a different statement.
Scientists hope to make use of data from this mission to predict solar flare activity and their companions, coronal mass ejections.