China to start building giant telescope to monitor solar winds that can knock out satellites and power grids
- Researchers say work will start soon to assemble the three antennas that will make up the Mingantu telescope in Inner Mongolia
- It will be used to track streams of charged particles from the sun that can trigger geomagnetic storms and cause serious disruption
Work to assemble a giant new telescope on the grasslands of northern China will start soon, according to researchers involved in the project.
Once complete, the Mingantu interplanetary scintillation (IPS) telescope in Inner Mongolia will be the most sensitive of its kind in the world and play a key role in monitoring solar winds to help protect power grids on Earth as well as astronauts and satellites in space.
Solar winds are a continual stream of charged particles blown out from the sun’s atmosphere. As they sweep through the solar system at a speed of hundreds of kilometres per second, they interact with the Earth’s magnetic field.
This is the cause of spectacular polar light shows, but they can also cause geomagnetic storms that disrupt communications and power supplies.
There were different ways to study the physics of the solar wind, said radio astronomer Chen Linjie from the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing, who is part of the Mingantu IPS telescope team.