India’s Chandrayaan-2 lunar orbiter has achieved a groundbreaking scientific milestone by making the first-ever observation of how a solar storm, specifically a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), affects the Moon’s exosphere.

The discovery stems from data collected by the orbiter’s Chandra’s Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2 (CHACE-2) instrument.

During a strong CME event on May 10, 2024, when the Sun released massive bursts of charged particles into space, CHACE-2 recorded a sudden rise in the total pressure of the Moon’s dayside exosphere, its extremely tenuous outer atmosphere.

Scientists found that the total number density, which measures the concentration of neutral atoms or molecules per unit volume, increased by more than an order of magnitude.

This observation confirms long-standing

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