The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) on the Tibetan Plateau began its solar research testing on July 14.
The Daocheng Telescope was developed by the National Space Science Center (NSSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is part of China’s Meridian Project Phase 2. In 2008, China launched the Meridian Project, a monitoring network consisting of 31 ground stations, to study space weather and understand the processes that lead to severe weather events.
The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope began testing operations on July 14. (Photo: China Media Group).
Daocheng is the largest telescope in the world dedicated to solar research and studying the sun’s impact on Earth, having completed construction in November 2022. This system is capable of continuously and stably monitoring solar activities with high quality. The NSSC stated that Daocheng’s observational capabilities, such as detecting pulsars, have been validated after six months of troubleshooting and testing.
Located on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau in the southwestern Sichuan Province at an altitude of over 3,800 meters above sea level, the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope consists of 313 six-meter-wide parabolic antennas arranged in a circular formation with a circumference of 3.14 kilometers, surrounding a 100-meter-high calibration tower at its center. Daocheng operates in the frequency range of 150 – 450 megahertz to capture high-precision images of activities such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Additionally, this telescope aids in exploring methods for tracking pulsars, radio bursts, and asteroids.
“We are entering a golden age of solar astronomy as many large solar telescopes are now operational,” commented Maria Kazachenko, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Observatories in China will provide crucial data on solar activities that telescopes in other time zones may not be able to observe, according to Ding Mingde, a solar physicist at Nanjing University. Furthermore, Ding emphasized the importance of global collaboration in this field.
