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.
