Produced by: Tarun Mishra Designed by: Manoj Kumar
The Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) aboard India's Aditya-L1 spacecraft has achieved a historic milestone by capturing the initial full-disk images of the Sun in near ultraviolet wavelengths.
The images span a wavelength range of 200 to 400 nanometres, offering insights into the Sun's photosphere and chromosphere—the visible "surface" and the transparent layer just above it.
SUIT's images provide essential information about the Sun's photosphere and chromosphere, which are crucial for understanding solar phenomena like sunspots, flares, and prominences, with potential impacts on space weather and Earth's climate.
SUIT was turned on by ISRO on November 20. Following a successful pre-commissioning phase, it captured its first light science images on December 6.
Equipped with eleven different filters, SUIT enables detailed observations of the Sun's atmosphere, exposing features such as sunspots, plage regions, and the quiet Sun.
Developed by a team of 50 scientists, researchers, and students from Pune's Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), SUIT is one of the seven payloads on Aditya-L1.
Aditya-L1's mission is to address fundamental questions about energy propagation from the photosphere to the chromosphere, understanding triggers behind dynamic solar events, and to explore the initial kinematics of erupting prominences.
Data collected by SUIT promises to revolutionise our understanding of solar atmospheric dynamics, providing insights into the intricate coupling and energy transfer mechanisms within the Sun's layers.
As Aditya-L1 continues its journey to Lagrange Point 1, the scientific community eagerly anticipates more revelations from India's maiden solar probe, with ISRO expressing confidence that SUIT's observations will deepen our understanding of the Sun's magnetised atmosphere and its effects on Earth's climate.