The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) organised the fifth Aditya-L1 Workshop at the institute.
According to a press release by IIT Kanpur, the 3-day workshop was jointly organised by the Department of Physics and the Aditya-L1 Support Cell at Aryabhatta Observational Science Research Institute (ARIES), Nainital.
IITK is actively involved in the science objectives of the Aditya-L1 Mission by ISRO, where a satellite has been launched to the Sun for the first time by India to study the Sun, its atmosphere, and its effects on Earth. The workshop aimed to train selected final-year undergraduate (UG), MSc, and PhD students in the utilisation of upcoming data from the satellite, informed IITK.
The workshop was inaugurated by Prof Harshawardhan Wanare, Head of the Department of Physics and the Centre for Lasers and Photonics at IIT Kanpur. Dr Vaibhav Pant of ARIES delivered a speech on the importance of the Aditya-L1 support cell for analysing upcoming data from the Aditya-L1 mission.
According to the media release, participants at the workshop were given hands-on training in using the magnetohydrodynamic code PLUTO, a numerical code for computational astrophysics used to understand the origin of solar storms. They also visited the Plasma lab to learn about the generation and confinement of plasma in the laboratory. Prof Dipankar Banerjee, Director of ARIES, presented a lecture on “Aditya-L1: India’s own mission,” emphasising how a nationwide collaborative effort among many institutes led to the creation of one of the world’s most cutting-edge space observatories, entirely made in India.