Three days after Earth was hit by a powerful solar storm on May 10, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) released its observations of the geomagnetic event from different angles, including its own solar mission, Aditya L1. This was the strongest solar storm to hit Earth in decades and was categorised as a G5-level storm on the geomagnetic scale.
ISRO revealed the India-related impacts of the solar storm and said that because India is at a lower latitude, it didn't report widespread outages like other regions in the Pacific and American sectors.
“Indian sector got less affected as the main hit of the storm happened in the early morning of 11th May, when ionosphere has not developed fully. Also, being at lower latitudes, widespread outages haven't been reported in India. Ionosphere was very turbulent over the Pacific and American sectors,” a statement from the space agency said.
India's first solar mission, Aditya L1, lifted off successfully on September 2, carrying seven different payloads designed for a detailed study of the Sun. The mission comprises two subsystem instruments – the Solar wind Ion Spectrometer (SWIS) and STEPS (Supra Thermal and Energetic Particle Spectrometer).
“SWIS has captured the enhancement of the alpha particle and proton flux of the solar wind as a signature of this solar eruptive event. STEPS measure the flux of the solar wind ions at seven energy ranges and reported a steady rise in the energetic ion fluxes during the event has been noticed,” ISRO said.
“The X-ray payloads on-board Aditya-L1 (SoLEXS and HEL1OS) have observed the multiple X- and M-class flares from these regions during the last few days while the in-situ magnetometer (MAG) payload has also observed the events as it passed by the L1 point,” the space agency added.
India's second moon mission, which couldn't complete its mission objective has a working orbiter, which captured the signatures of these solar eruptive events from the lunar polar orbit.
“The large solar flares, manifested as spikes, are autonomously identified by the onboard logic of XSM, when the internal mechanism was activated to reduce the incident X-ray flux by bringing a filter in front of the detector, so as to prevent its saturation. While the XSM primarily monitors solar X-rays, it has also provided information about the local high energy particle environment by means of counting the events when the upper level discriminator (ULD) threshold is crossed,” ISRO said.
“The ULD event light curve over the past five days, shown in figure, clearly shows the enhancement of the local charge particle concentration from 9th May onwards. The dips observed in the XSM ULD light curve are due to the shadow effect arising from orbit of the spacecraft around the Moon,” the space agency added.
