SUIT: Special telescope to track Sun's magnetic field ready for India's first solar mission

Our increasing dependence on space-based communication as well as the desire to set up colonies on far-off planets has brought attention to space weather - caused by solar winds and flares. NASA has deployed the Parker Mission to improve our understanding of the events happening on the sun and now India plans to send its Aditya mission to know more about the nuclear ball at the center of our solar system.

The Aditya L1 mission

Scheduled for a launch in mid-August this year, the Aditya-L1 mission is India's first mission to study the Sun from space. The spacecraft will travel a distance of over 932,000 miles(1.5 million km) over a period of 100 days to reach Lagrange Point 1 or L1, which will provide unobstructed views of the Sun.

The mission will carry seven payloads to study various aspects of the Sun such as the photosphere - the visible surface, chromosphere - the layer of plasma, and corona - the outermost layer using a range of detection methods.

Four of these payloads are designed to directly view the sun, while three others will make measurements of particles and magnetic fields in-situ.

Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope

The SUIT is responsible for imaging the solar photosphere and chromosphere in the near-ultraviolet spectrum.

The telescope was produced under the guidance of A N Ramaprakash and Durgesh Tripathi at IUCAA in partnership with ISRO with assistance from other scientific organizations. "The telescope is one of the seven payloads on Aditya-L1. It is unique because it will provide full disk images of the sun in the 2000 to 4000 A wavelength range which has never been obtained," Tripathi told Times of India.

The telescope is the first instrument that will allow measurements to be made for this wavelength.

According to the researcher involved in building the telescope, the wavelength is crucial for maintaining the ozone and oxygen content in Earth's atmosphere. Moreover, the instrument will also be able to capture the intensity of UV radiation that is associated with skin cancer.

SUIT will help us understand some of the fundamental questions that remained unanswered about the Sun, such as why the outer layers of the star remain hotter than its surface, and the origin and variation of solar flares.

More than 200 scientists designed and developed SUIT over 10 years. The researchers had to develop specialized filters to enable the capture of radiation at the respective wavelengths.

The telescope has now reached ISRO, where it will be integrated with the other payloads on the mission. The mission will be launched on ISRO's PSLV rocket and placed in low-Earth Orbit. Later, the orbit of the spacecraft will be made more elliptical and then launched toward the L1 point using onboard propulsion.