A new Chinese radar facility could become a weapon hiding in plain sight

IN A small coastal town in the South China Sea, just 4200 kilometres from Darwin, China is building a facility designed to shoot radio waves into Earth’s upper atmosphere.

China says it’s for scientific purposes. But critics aren’t entirely convinced.

Researcher in the field of ionospheric science are excited about the prospect of learning more about the electrified edge of our atmosphere but when the site is up and running it could also give China a sizeable military advantage in the strategically important region.

The infrastructure project — to be built later this year on the island of Hainan, China’s southernmost point — will consist of radio equipment, antennas and various measuring equipment designed to interact with the ionosphere, a distinguished layer of Earth’s atmosphere because it is ionised by extreme solar radiation.

Sitting above us at about 85km to 600km altitude, scientists have long been interested in the ionosphere because it plays an important role in atmospheric electricity and reflects and modifies radio waves used for communication and navigation. In fact, before we were launching satellites, in order to have over the horizon communication we would bounce radio waves off the ionosphere.

In recent decades, researchers have sought to learn more about it by shooting pulsed energy beams at it and measuring how the highly charged particles react. That is what China is planning on doing as it sets out to build a facility that will feature a device known as a High-powered Incoherent Scatter Radar.

Such technology has long caught the imagination of conspiracy theorists who claim it can be used to control the weather and even cause natural disasters.

While those ideas have been continually debunked, the technology could theoretically be used to detect nano satellites, enhance underwater communication with submarines and disrupt rival communication networks by creating an atmospheric “black hole”.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/a-new-chinese-radar-facility-could-become-a-weapon-hiding-in-plain-sight/news-story/acbe423f03b2e1d042723892bb080bb8