Arun Kumar Grover


Former Vice-Chancellor, Panjab University

INDIA has had a wealthy custom of photo voltaic analysis for the reason that appointment of HF Blanford as the primary Director General of the India Meteorological Department (1875-89). He had proposed in 1881 that correct information of the solar’s heating energy on the earth’s floor, its periodic variations and the monsoon patterns in India be maintained. Ruchi Ram Sahni, the pioneer of popularisation of science in Punjab, was the primary native officer inducted in 1885 because the Second Assistant Meteorological Reporter to work beneath Blanford, when he was the Imperial Meteorological Reporter posted at Shimla.

The Kodaikanal Solar Observatory (KSO), the successor to the Madras Observatory, got here into being in 1899; it was right here in 1909 that British astronomer J Evershed found an impact in photo voltaic astronomy that bears his identify — ‘Evershed effect’. Evershed had provided a place to KS Krishnan to work on the KSO, however he proceeded to Calcutta to work with CV Raman. Krishnan was the co-author of the analysis paper with Raman on the invention of the ‘Raman Effect’ in 1928. The Government of India had issued a postage stamp in December 2008 to commemorate the centenary of the ‘Evershed Effect’. The Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bengaluru, established in 1971 by subsuming the observatories at Kodaikanal and Kavalur, has constructed the Visible Line Emission Coronagraph, one of many fundamental payloads of Aditya-L1.

The space-bound Indian observatory mission, Aditya-L1, is anticipated to succeed in its vacation spot, the place the gravitational power of the earth balances that of the solar, early subsequent 12 months. After induction right into a halo orbit at L1, it will begin observations that would final 5 years or extra. The Indian mission contains seven payloads to look at the photosphere, chromosphere and the outermost layers of the solar. However, the strategic activity assigned to it’s to review the house climate, ie, the unpredictable spikes within the magnetic area attributable to the charged particles ejected as coronal mass ejection (CME) by the solar. Such CMEs act as supersonic electromagnetic weapons launched by the solar in random instructions, which typically get focused in direction of the earth. Their harmful energy weakens as they journey and broaden, however typically carry sufficient depth to pose a risk to our technology-dependent civilisation by destroying communication and remote-sensing satellites orbiting the earth, and damaging high-voltage electrical grids on the bottom. The solely safety from this devastation is a whole international electrical shutdown.

The sunspot exercise is thought to observe an 11-year cycle; this exercise would attain the subsequent extremum round 2026, when Aditya-L1 can be working. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been monitoring the house climate by stationing a number of satellites at L1 for about three many years. On June 22, 2015, NASA acquired a warning of a ‘severe’ photo voltaic storm from its satellites. In October 2016, then US President Barack Obama had issued an govt order directing NASA and different authorities businesses within the US to organize for such emergencies. The UK reckons hostile house climate as probably the most critical pure hazards in its National Risk Register.

It is serendipity that an Indian cosmic ray experiment named GRAPES-3 (Gamma Ray Astronomy at PeV EnergieS-Phase 3) found the ‘transient weakening of the earth’s magnetic defend’ that correlated with the photo voltaic storm of June 22, 2015, which was revealed in Physical Review Letters, probably the most prestigious journals of physics, in 2016. This Indian work additionally confirmed that the earth’s magnetic area acted as a brake on this storm, decreasing its velocity of 700 km/second at L1 to 35 km/second, thereby inflicting a further delay of half-hour. Accurate storm arrival time on the earth is important to minimise the financial losses throughout a worldwide shutdown.

The discovery established GRAPES-3 as one of many world’s most delicate devices for learning house climate. It had triggered an avalanche of consideration by the worldwide media on the Ooty experiment, with over 1,000 studies showing in 37 languages in 119 nations. Anil Kakodkar, former Chairperson of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, had known as for in accordance excessive precedence to unbiased analysis on house climate. The group chief of GRAPES-3, Prof SK Gupta, was elected Chairman of IUPAP (International Union of Pure and Applied Physics) Commission C4 on Astroparticle Physics throughout the General Assembly of IUPAP in 2017. Earlier this 12 months, he was honoured with the distinguished O’Ceallaigh medal throughout the thirty eighth International Cosmic Ray Conference in Nagoya, Japan.

Indian participation in cosmic ray analysis had commenced in 1926 with the go to of Prof AH Compton (Nobel Prize in physics, 1927), following an invite from the University of the Punjab at Lahore for collaborative analysis. JM Benade, SS Bhatnagar and Nazir Ahmed from Lahore had accompanied Compton’s crew to measure the depth of cosmic rays whereas reducing an ionisation detector to the underside of a lake close to Gulmarg. Homi Bhabha, then an intermediate pupil, had acquired impressed to pursue a profession in physics by way of a lecture delivered by Compton in Bombay in 1926. In 1931, the primary profitable experiment that established cosmic rays as charged particles was carried out at totally different latitudes throughout India by Compton and his Indian collaborators, Benade and R Wilson of Forman Christian College, Lahore, and geologist George Roerich of Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute at Naggar (close to Manali, Himachal Pradesh).

In 1955, Bhabha impressed his pupil, BV Sreekantan, to arrange the Cosmic Ray Laboratory of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Ooty, the place the GRAPES-3 experiment continues as an India-Japan collaboration. Bhabha is usually remembered for his prophetic phrases: “All fundamental research could one day become useful.”

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