Aditya-L1 mission to unravel the secrets of solar storms that destroyed Elon Musk’s satellites

tech.hindustantimes.com:

In just a few hours, India's first-ever space mission to study the Sun and the space weather, Aditya-L1, will take off. Once it completes its long journey to its destination of the L1 Lagrange point, it will begin observing the Sun using the seven payloads that will collect data from it. Apart from observing the Sun, its corona, and its dynamic patterns, it will also study space weather, in particular the effect of solar winds and coronal mass ejection (CME) in causing solar storms. Understanding this phenomenon is crucial, as it contains the destructive potential to damage all satellites in space. In fact, it did exactly that in February 2022 when Elon Musk's SpaceX lost 40 of its Starlink satellites to solar storms.

According to an update by SpaceX, the solar storm struck just a day after the Starlink satellites were launched. The update confirmed that a solar storm was behind the company losing its fleet of satellites as it increased air drag in the upper atmosphere. It stated, “Preliminary analysis shows the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe mode to begin orbit-raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth's atmosphere”.

Now, a year and a half later, ISRO is launching the Aditya-L1 mission to study and uncover the secrets of space weather that have confused humans for more than two centuries. Even today, many solar observatories such as NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory as well as Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, and ESA's Solar Orbiter continue to watch the Sun to improve both our analysis and prediction models for solar storm, but so far, there has been no breakthrough.

It is because there is still so much we do not