Phase II of China’s massive space environment monitoring project enters trial operation

Addis Ababa, December 26, 2023 (FBC) – The second phase of China’s ground-based space environment monitoring network, the Meridian Project, has entered the stage of joint debugging and trial operation.

The phase II project comprises 16 stations, 58 observation points and 195 sets of space weather monitoring equipment. Together with the first phase, it will make the Meridian Project the world’s largest comprehensive space environment monitoring network and provide data support for improving the precision of space weather forecasts.

“The second phase of the Meridian Project is currently in a stage of comprehensive debugging, joint testing and trial operation. We will make every effort to complete state acceptance next year and put it into operation,” said Wang Chi, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who serves as the commander-in-chief of the phase II project.

The Meridian Project is China’s first national-level major science and technology infrastructure in the field of space science. The first phase was officially put into operation in 2012 after four years of construction. It consists of 15 comprehensive stations and 87 sets of monitoring equipment arranged along 120 degrees east longitude and 30 degrees north latitude.

The project has achieved a series of original results in understanding the characteristics of the near-Earth space environment of the 120-degree meridian chain in China and the propagation and evolution of space weather disturbances.

The construction of the second phase started in 2019, deploying 16 stations, 58 observation points, and 195 sets of equipment along a 100-degree east longitude and 40-degree north latitude to form a tic-tac-toe shaped ground-based space environment monitoring network with the first phase so that the system will have wider coverage, higher detection height, and stronger monitoring capabilities.

It is expected that the first and second phases of the Meridian Project will operate as many as 44 kinds of nearly 300 instruments, which can simultaneously cover the chromosphere, the corona, the solar wind, the magnetosphere, the ionosphere, the middle and upper atmosphere, and the lower atmosphere. CGTN