2024-05-11 09:32
Source: China.com
The link has been copied
Font: Small Big
On May 10, the interplanetary scintillation monitoring telescope, one of the major equipment of the national major scientific and technological infrastructure "Space Environment Ground-based Integrated Monitoring Network" (Meridian Project Phase II), passed the process test, which will efficiently carry out daily monitoring of interplanetary space weather and provide high-quality observation data for continental and international space weather forecasting. It is the continent's first telescope dedicated to interplanetary scintillation monitoring.
The China Electronics Network Communications Research Institute has equipped the interplanetary scintillation monitoring telescope with multiple sets of antenna equipment for the main station and auxiliary station. Among them, the main station antenna equipment adopts three sets of 140-meter × 40-meter parabolic cylindrical antennas, which breaks through the key technologies such as high-precision synchronous control, broadband feed, and close feed mutual coupling of giant movable parabolic cylindrical antennas, which can realize electrodynamic beam scanning and multi-beam synthesis, and has the ability to observe multiple targets at the same time with high sensitivity, and will be the world's most advanced large-scale parabolic cylindrical antenna after completion. The auxiliary station adopts a parabolic antenna with a diameter of 30 meters, which can realize the reception of strong radio power signals.
The Interplanetary Scintillation Monitoring Telescope is led by the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has realized the comprehensive localization of chip-level to system-level development, and its detection sensitivity has reached the international leading level.
The radio waves radiated by compact objects outside the Milky Way galaxy are scattered by the turbulent irregular structure of the solar wind as they pass through interplanetary space, eventually forming random fluctuations in the radio temporal flow, a phenomenon named interplanetary scintillation. Interplanetary scintillation is like a radio buoy in the solar wind and can be used to monitor the propagation of solar storms in interplanetary space.