China is Building the World's Largest Array of Telescopes That Will Shed More Light on Coronal Mass Ejections

As part of an ongoing investigation of the sun, its CMEs, and their impact on the earth, a 1.95-mile diameter network of solar telescopes are under development in China.

China is Building the World's Largest Array of Telescopes That Will Shed More Light on Coronal Mass Ejections
(Photo : NOEL CELIS / Getty Images)
China is constructing the world's biggest solar telescope array to study coronal mass ejections (CME), which can damage Earth's atmosphere.

Extensive Telescopes are Beinng Built in China For Solar Probes

To get a deeper understanding of coronal mass ejections, which have the potential to wreak havoc on Earth and in its atmosphere, China is now building the most extensive array of telescopes ever assembled for the exclusive purpose of studying the sun, reports Space.com.

Southwest China's Sichuan province is home to the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT). Together, the dishes will create a 1.95-mile circle, with each dish measuring 19.7 feet (6 meters) in diameter (3.14 kilometers).

Massive eruptions of charged particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, known as the corona, will be studied using radio-wave images of the sun taken by the telescope array. Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are the name for these outbursts.

An article from South China Morning Post, as cited in Space.com, states that the DSRT should be finished on time by the end of this year.

The development is a component of China's space surveillance project, Meridian (Phase II), and to track solar activity, the Chinese Spectral Radioheliograph will be built as part of the project in Inner Mongolia.

In order to further Chinese solar physics and space weather studies, the radioheliograph has 100 spiral dishes and will examine the sun over a more comprehensive frequency range than the DSRT did.

Three hundred sensors will be installed as part of the experiment at 31 locations around China, each at a unique longitude and latitude junction. The Chinese Academy of Sciences' National Space Science Center (NSSC) has received support from more than 10 Chinese companies and institutions.

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China Launched Three Clandestine Surveillance Satellites Join Previous Sets in Orbit

Three Yaogan 35 series covert spy satellites, as per Space.com, were launched by China on August 19 to join three other sets that are already orbiting the earth. These satellites will be added to the three other sets already in orbit.

The satellites were sent into orbit by a Long March 2D rocket on August 19 at 1:37 pm EDT from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the province of Sichuan and got underway at 1:37 am local time.

The trio will likely join the three sets of Yaogan 35 triplet satellites that were launched in orbit by three successive missions in November 2021 and June and July of this year. With an inclination of 35 degrees and an orbital altitude of around 310 miles (500 kilometers), the first nine satellites are currently providing frequent, repeated passes over regions of interest.

Their intended use may not be evident as the majority of Yaogan (remote sensing) satellites are unknown. The recently launched spacecraft, according to official Chinese media, will be utilized for scientific research, land resource assessments, agricultural production estimates, and disaster prevention and mitigation.

On the contrary, Chinese Yaogan satellites have both military and commercial use, as pointed by Western space researchers.

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