Chandrayaan 2 measures solar fury inflating atmosphere of Moon

Shedding light on solar activity and the Moon’s exosphere—a Diwali gift from Chandrayaan 2

Illustration visualizing the Sun’s radiation wind bombarding the Moon, and various spacecraft observing its activity and effects. Background image: E. Masongsong / UCLA EPSS | Derivative graphic and annotations: Jatan MehtaTheoretical and computational models of highly energetic solar storms have predicted for more than a decade that the density of the Moon’s nearside exosphere increases by at least ten times during such events. Between our Moon…

Chandrayaan 2 measures solar fury inflating atmosphere of Moon

New Delhi: A series of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) resulted in the strongest geomagnetic storm seen in two decades in May last year. The charged plasma clouds launched outwards from the Sun interacted with each other in interstellar space, having an impact on all the worlds across the Solar System. ISRO’s Aditya L1 and Chandrayaan spacecraft both observed the impact of the extreme space weather event, and now the study by ISRO scientists on th…