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Help! The sun is not hotting up

Isro will launch a satellite into the solar atmosphere to study the reasons for solar cooling.

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Concerned over the sun’s apparent cooling down and curious to know how that would affect the earth and its climate, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) is planning its first sun-bound satellite, Aditya-1, which would skirt the outer solar atmosphere to send back crucial data.

The 100kg satellite is scheduled to be launched in 2013. The Rs128-crore Aditya mission received the go-ahead from the government in December 2009.

“The focus will be on the low activity of the sun and what happens if the phenomenon were to continue into the next decade,” said the principal investigator of the mission, Jagdev Singh. “We included this objective since there is very low activity on the sun. The solar cycle, which by now should have entered the high activity phase or maxima, is not happening. We see sunspots, but very irregularly,” he said.

The sunspots, which regularly occur as the sun hots up during the solar maximum cycle, appear once in two months and for much shorter periods of three to five days.

The sun goes through a cycle of 11 years when it cools down and then hots up again, alternatively. In the earlier cycles, the sunspots and active regions appeared continuously and lasted for 15 days to one month, and increased as the sun moved towards the maximum period.

“The cycle has been delayed by close to three years now. So the satellite, when launched, will observe the sun for five to six years. Based on the data, it will help build a model of what happens during low activity on the sun,” Singh said.

The scientific community the world over is worried if we are heading towards Maunder minimum, a situation similar to what had happened between 1645 and 1715 when there was minimum activity on the sun. The much smaller sunspots, appearing irregularly in the otherwise active solar regions, is happening again. Back then, only 50 sunspots had appeared as against a normal of 50,000.

Since the solar data collected by scientists dates back to only 150 years, there is no way of knowing how the Maunder minimum had affected the earth from 1645 to 1715, Singh said.

“We will now study the effects on climatic conditions too. But as of now, we are not predicting if we are going to face a similar situation as then. We will have to wait for the observations,” Singh said.

The Aditya-1 mission will help Indian space scientists estimate how much thermal insulation would be required for Isro spacecrafts carrying astronauts, as India’s first manned low-orbit space mission is scheduled for 2015.

The abrupt end of India’s first unmanned moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, due to intense radiation (thermal heating) has led scientists to use the Aditya mission for this purpose, too. The data is also expected to be shared with other countries sending astronauts to the international space station, besides for safety in future space tourism projects.

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