Radio telescope for monitoring the state of interplanetary plasma

This paper examines scientific and technical requirements for a specialized radio telescope which allows us to make a space weather forecast from observations of radio sources that scintillate on moving irregularities of interplanetary plasma. It is shown that in addition to forecasting the radio telescope can solve other scientific problems. A variant of the antenna's technical implementation is proposed, and the structure of the radio telescope is studied. The radio telescope is a spaced antenna array consisting of modules, each with 16 (4×4) base antenna elements representing 2 orthogonal dipoles. The effective area of a module is 16 m2 at the central frequency of 180 MHz; the total operating frequency band is 120–240 MHz. The module’s field of view is at least 400 sq.deg. in the range ± 50° from the zenith at the central frequency. The sensitivity drops by a factor of 2 at the edges of the field of view. It is demonstrated that the telescope consisting of 64 modules will provide a forecast at least 2–3 times a day. The estimated accuracy of predicting the arrival time of coronal mass ejection at Earth is one hour.