China is building the world’s largest array of telescopes dedicated to studying the sun with the aim to improve the understanding of coronal mass ejections which can cause chaos on and above Earth.
The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) is under construction on a plateau in Sichuan province, southwest China. When completed, it will consist of 313 dishes, each with a diameter of 19.7 feet (6 meters), forming a circle with a circumference of 1.95 miles (3.14 kilometers).
The telescope array will image the sun in radio waves to study coronal mass ejections (CMEs), large eruptions of charged particles from the sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona.
The project also includes the Chinese Spectral Radioheliograph for monitoring solar activity, which is being constructed (opens in new tab)in Inner Mongolia.
The radioheliograph will consist of 100 dishes in a three-arm spiral arrangement and will study the sun in a wider band of frequencies than DSRT to further Chinese research of the sun, solar physics and space weather.
The entire project aims to run close to 300 instruments deployed at 31 stations across China at specific longitudes and latitudes. It is led by the National Space Science Center (NSSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and involves more than 10 institutions and universities in China.
According to space
