In a recent avant-garde advancement, a team of Indian astrophysicists have created a solar wind model to predict the properties of solar wind in space. This state-of-the-art development, based on observations of solar surface that come from the GONG observatory, has been implemented by scientists from Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Indore and Physical Research Laboratory Ahmedabad.

This will act as a forecasting model for solar wind streams that govern circulation of space weather drivers in the heliosphere. The work by the Indore and Ahmedabad team, and funded by ISRO RESPOND programme, will predictably aid the ISRO mission Aditya-L1 in the future. Aditya-L1 is India's first dedicated spacecraft mission to study the Sun.

When high-speed wind interacts with slow-speed wind, a compressed and turbulent Stream Interaction Region (SIR) is formed, which gives rise to weak to moderate geomagnetic storms. The resultant can affect terrestrial tech infrastructure and can also threaten the health of satellites and astronauts.

“In this work, we have studied some peculiar characteristics of SIRs in the azimuthal and meridional directions. ASPEX payload has that three directional observation capability and can detect those features and provide a better SIR detection functionality," noted Professor Dibyendu Chakrabarty, co-author and principal investigator of ASPEX payload at Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.

In addition, the model has synthesised potential multifold directional observations of SWIS, a sub-system of in-situ instrument ASPEX, of the ISRO mission. Once deployed at Aditya-L1, it will measure proton and alpha particles individually in azimuthal and radial directions, along with the integrated flux in meridional direction.

“We have developed and successfully validated the solar wind module of SWASTi: Space Weather Adaptive Simulation framework. This data-driven and 3D physics-based model has been optimised with an intention to run on a personal workstation in reasonable computational time with adequate accuracy," explained Prateek Mayank, PMRF PhD student and first author of the work.

The work has also been accepted to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (ApJS). The upcoming Aditya-L1 mission is expected to study the Sun from space, and its seven payloads are being developed by numerous Indian institutes.