Groundbreaking Telescope to Monitor Sun and Space Weather to Launch Aboard ADITYA-1 Spacecraft
A pioneering space telescope named the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) has been created by the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) located in Pune.
On June 6, ICAA handed over the telescope to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), where it will be integrated into the ADITYA-L1 mission as a key instrument.
Once launched with the satellite, it will travel about 1.5 million kilometers towards the Sun, specifically to the L1 point, providing regular updates and images of the Sun’s surface phenomena and space weather.
The IUCAA project is led by prof. AN Ramprakash and Professor Durgesh Tripathi who have worked closely with ISRO to create SUIT. The observations of this telescope make India one of the leading countries in the field of ultraviolet solar observation.
Ramprakash explained, “SUIT is one of the main payloads of Aditya-L1. It provides full disk images of the Sun in the 2000 to 4000 A wavelength range. Full disk images of the entire wavelength range have never been obtained. Among many, there are a few fundamental questions that SUIT will address, such as the existence of a higher temperature atmosphere above the cooler surface, the origin and variations of near-ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and high-energy explosions such as solar flares.observed in the solar atmosphere, etc.
