Engineers just finished mounting the final pieces of hardware onto the world's largest telescope array to study the Sun.
The construction of the DSRT, which consists of more than 300 dish-shaped antennas, was finished on 13 November. In June, trial operations will start. Researchers will be able to study solar eruptions and how they affect Earth at the observatory.
"We are entering the golden age of solar astronomy as we have lots of major solar telescopes coming online." The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter was launched in 2020 and the NASA'sParker Solar probe was launched in 2018?
Over the next few years, the Sun is going to be very active. The data collected by DSRT will complement those gathered by telescopes. China has launched at least four Sun-gazing satellites in the past two years that study the star at ultraviolet and X-ray frequencies. According to a solar physicist at Peking University in Beijing, China now has instruments that can observe all levels of the sun.
The data on solar activities that are not visible to telescopes in other time zones will be provided by Chinese observatory. Global collaboration is required for solar research.
There are radio telescopes that can be used to study the Sun's upper atmosphere, such as the corona. When the Sun's magnetic field snaps, there are eruptions of hot plasma from the corona. Satellites can be damaged and power grids can be disrupted when high-energy particles are released into the sky.
The 40 Starlink communications satellites were destroyed in February by a weak CME. There is an increasing need to better forecast space weather.
Predicting space weather isn't easy. According to the chief engineer of DSRT at the National Space, DSRT has a wide field of view that is 36 times larger than the Sun's disk. Predicting whether or not the coronal mass ejections will reach Earth is possible with this information.
DSRT will be able to achieve high sensitivity for space weather forecasting. The large array could potentially capture weaker signals from high-energy particles that might be missed by a smaller array with fewer antennas.
International researchers will be able to use DSRT's observation data. The National Space Science Center in China plans to open the telescope at night for other types of observation. A new optical telescope is being built in China and is expected to be finished in six years.
The article is titled: "D41586 022-03595-7."
The story was changed to reflect that the telescope was finished on 13 November.
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