China’s powerful sun-gazing telescope ready for launch

China will send a powerful telescope into space this autumn on a four-year mission to capture never-before-seen images of the sun during its stormy season, which will help scientists understand solar flares and other violent space weather.

The Advanced Space-Based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) is expected to launch on October 20 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert, according to a researcher familiar with the project.

It will join an international fleet of sun-gazing telescopes in space, including Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, to closely watch the sun as it nears the next solar maximum, a period of high solar activity expected to peak around 2025.

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The Chinese telescope is equipped with cutting-edge instruments to carry out observations impossible on any other platform.

From 720km (447 miles) above Earth, ASO-S will be the first telescope to simultaneously monitor the two most violent activities on our closest star – solar flares and coronal mass ejections – as well as its ever-changing magnetic field, according to the researcher.

This will help humans understand the relationship between these phenomena and how they trigger tumultuous space weather that can knock out power grids and internet services on Earth.

Solar flares are intense light bursts, while coronal mass ejections involve the release of huge clouds of charged particles called plasma.

Both are believed to be caused by the sun’s turbulent magnetic field.

The sun has become stormier since the current solar cycle began in December 2019.

During a solar maximum, solar flares can happen multiple times per day, and some may be as powerful as a billion hydrogen bombs, according to Nasa.

According to the researcher, who declined to be named, China ranked second in terms of solar physics papers published, but most of these studies were based on data obtained by other countries.

Since the 1960s, over 70 missions have been launched to study the sun from space.

Chinese scientists have developed remote sensing solar instruments and mounted them on other satellites, but ASO-S will be their first full-size, dedicated tool to examine the sun.

The 888kg (1,958lbs) telescope will carry equipment to observe the sun’s magnetic field, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The instruments are designed to work together to observe at high resolution, the researcher said.

In a paper published in Nature Astronomy in January, the mission’s leading scientists said data from ASO-S would be shared with the global scientific community.

The National Space Science Centre in Beijing has launched a campaign to solicit a Chinese name for the telescope.

Last October, China launched a small experimental satellite called the Chinese Hydrogen-Alpha Solar Explorer (CHASE) to study solar flares as a precursor to ASO-S.

Earlier this year, CHASE became the first telescope to obtain hydrogen-alpha spectral lines from space, which can reveal unique details about the structure, evolution and dynamic process of solar flares.

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China’s powerful sun-gazing telescope ready for launch

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