By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-04-03 01:06:37 | Updated at 2025-04-03 23:08:33
22 hours ago
Last May, an advanced critical long-range radar system used by China to detect stealth aircraft and ballistic missiles was temporarily disabled by a massive solar storm – a disruption that set off alarm bells over a key vulnerability of the system, according to a top Chinese space scientist.
The solar storm destabilised the ionosphere, which the “skywave” radar surveillance tools rely on to operate. The event revealed weaknesses of over-the-horizon (OTH) radar technology, which uses ionospheric reflection to monitor targets up to 3,000km (1,860 miles) beyond the Earth’s curvature.
The systems, prized for their ability to pierce the low-observable features of stealth aircraft, failed during the storm, which also triggered global short wave communication outages.
China’s answer to the problem is the Meridian Project Phase II – a just completed cutting-edge space weather monitoring network that Beijing has hailed as the world’s largest and most sophisticated system of its kind.
The matrix of 31 ground stations and 282 instruments, including ultra-sensitive lasers and a revolutionary solar-imaging radio telescope, acts like a CT scan for near-Earth space.
The network, which has supported more than 60 national space missions, will be integrated with satellites so that early warnings for solar-induced disasters can be issued, safeguarding critical infrastructure from cascading satellite, navigation, and power grid failures.
In an interview with state news agency Xinhua last month, Wang Chi, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the National Space Science Centre, revealed that a solar storm last year had temporarily crippled China’s long-range “skywave” radars.
