Chinese astronomers have built the country's first and the world's sharpest space solar telescope (SST), scheduled for launch in 2008 to observe the expected peak in sunspot activity the following year.

Jin Shengzhen, leading the ambitious project, told Xinhua News Agency yesterday, "Our telescope, with the highest optical resolution, will collect the most comprehensive solar scientific data."

The SST, with a couple of one-meter-caliber main optical telescopes, will be carried into a 730 km sun-synchronous orbit.

The two-ton system, including two main optical telescopes, X-ray telescopes, a wide-band spectrograph, a helium spectrum telescope and a radio spectrograph, is designed to function for three years.

It measures 5 x 2 x 2 meters and has cost 80 million yuan (US$9.66 million) so far.

"It will scan a 70-kilometer-diameter area of the solar surface," said Jin, principal researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), adding that its resolution is 10 times that of the current US solar telescope, SOHO.

High-performance computers, with a total of 50 central processing units, will transmit data at a speed of 100 mega-bytes per second from space to a ground station at Miyun, in the northeastern suburbs of Beijing.

The SST will be used to study the solar magnetic field, fine structures on the Sun's surface, the accumulation and release of solar flares and Sun-Earth interaction, said Jin.

This is China's first space solar telescope; developed countries have launched over 130 spacecraft for solar observation, 20 of which are still orbiting.

Japan, the US and UK are now jointly developing a new solar telescope called SOLAR-B. With a diameter of 0.5 meters, its optical resolution is only half that of China's.

William Livingston, a leading US National Solar Observatory astronomer, said the Chinese telescope is "unique" and "significant to push forward the edges of solar physical research."

Astronomers estimate that investment in the project by 2008 will be 1 billion yuan (US$120.8 million). They say it will be useful for improving technologies in remote sensing, global positioning and satellite data processing.

"China's first SST will lead its peers made by other countries in the early decades of the 21st century," said Sun Jiadong, an academician of the CAS and of the International Academy of Astronautics.

(Xinhua News Agency July 13, 2005)