India’s Aditya-L1 solar observatory has played a key role in explaining why the May 10, 2024 geomagnetic storm, dubbed “Gannon’s storm”, became the most powerful solar event in more than two decades, reaching the top G5 category on the NOAA scale and disrupting satellites, communications, GPS and power infrastructure worldwide. A study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters in early December 2025, drawing on multipoint observations from Aditya-L1 and six US spacecraft including NASA’s Wind, ACE, DSCOVR, THEMIS-C, STEREO-A and MMS, shows that a rare sequence of multiple coronal mass ejections from the Sun collided en route to Earth, triggering large-scale magnetic reconnection inside an interplanetary CME flux rope. Precise magnetometer measurements from Aditya-L1 at the L1 Lagrange point enabled scientists to map an internal reconnection region about 1.3 million km across, nearly 100 times Earth’s diameter, where the storm’s magnetic field sharply reversed, greatly enhancing energy transfer into Earth’s magnetosphere and marking a major advance in global space-weather forecasting capabilities and India’s heliophysics profile.