It was renewed in February, for a further 4 years, the’framework collaboration agreement signed by Italian Air Force, INAF (National Institute for Astrophysics) and INGV (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology), aimed at collaborating on the development of an autonomous operational capability for Space Weather with national assets, increasing synergies, capabilities and the efficient and effective use of public resources.
The ability to monitor, understand and predict changing solar phenomena and its considerable impact on the space environment and on our technologies such as telecommunication systems, GPS, radar and orbiting satellites, is in fact a challenge that is gaining increasing importance, both in the military and civil spheres.
Under the existing agreement, there has just concluded the first SOLARIS observing campaign, a new Italian observatory in Antarctica, as a first step towards the development of an international system for the continuous monitoring of the Sun at high radio frequencies, which is fundamental for identifying precursor signals of geomagnetic storms that can interfere with our technological systems, in space and on the ground.
The choice to position the SOLARIS telescope at the Italian “Mario Zucchelli” base in Antarctica it is due to the greater clarity of the atmosphere, guaranteed by the low humidity which would otherwise absorb high-frequency radio signals, but also and above all to the long persistence of the Sun in the sky (about 20 hours a day) during the Antarctic summer.
To date, SOLARIS is the only facility to offer radio band monitoring of the Sun allowing us to observe the variations that take place in the solar chromosphere, a layer of our star's atmosphere where highly energetic phenomena such as flares and coronal mass ejections are formed, opening up the possibility of forecasting potential solar storms.
This project, the result of a skilled collaboration between numerous universities and national scientific institutions, also involved CNMCA personnel (National Centre for Meteorology and Aerospace Climatology) of Pratica di Mare in coordination with the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).
Based on the recently renewed agreement, CNMCA personnel are participating in the analysis of the initial data and images obtained during the observation campaign in Antarctica, after having provided useful information for selecting the most promising active regions for these first observations. Furthermore, directly on-site, the meteorological support provided by the Armed Forces forecasting personnel deployed on the National Antarctic Research Programme expedition enabled the planning and safe execution of the observations themselves.
Given the international interest, the SOLARIS project will be implemented with the installation of similar radio telescopes in the northern hemisphere too, in Scandinavia, thereby creating a network capable of offering a unique service for monitoring solar activity, in real time, throughout the year.
It National Centre for Aerospace Meteorology and Climatology (CNMCA) is under the command of the 9th ISTAR-EW Air Brigade based in Pratica di Mare and provides meteorological support to multiple entities in both the military and civil sectors. The Centre provides uninterrupted meteorological support to Armed Forces, Defence, NATO and European Union assets wherever they are deployed, both on national territory and in operational theatres, while at the same time guaranteeing meteorological services for air navigation in favour of Operational and General Air Traffic. In this regard, the Centre has Aeronautical Meteorological Watch Office (MWO) responsibilities for the Milan, Rome and Brindisi Flight Information Regions (FIRs), for which it issues the necessary flight safety messages.
