A Pilot Study of Interplanetary Scintillation with FAST

TL;DR

This study demonstrates the capability of FAST, the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, to observe interplanetary scintillation with high sensitivity and broad frequency coverage, enabling detailed solar wind analysis.

Contribution

The paper introduces the use of FAST for IPS observations, highlighting its high sensitivity and wide frequency range, along with new analysis methods for solar wind velocity estimation.

Findings

FAST successfully observed IPS sources like 3C 286 and 3C 279.

The wide frequency coverage allows for dual-frequency analysis of solar wind velocity.

Preliminary results indicate FAST's high capability for IPS observations.

Abstract

Observations of Interplanetary Scintillation (IPS) are an efficient remote-sensing method to study the solar wind and inner heliosphere. From 2016 to 2018, some distinctive observations of IPS sources like 3C 286 and 3C 279 were accomplished with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), the largest single-dish telescope in the world. Due to the 270-1620 MHz wide frequency coverage of the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) receiver, one can use both single-frequency and dual-frequency analyses to determine the projected velocity of the solar wind. Moreover, based on the extraordinary sensitivity owing to the large collecting surface area of FAST, we can observe weak IPS signals. With the advantages of both the wider frequency coverage and high sensitivity, also with our radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation strategy and an optimized model-fitting method developed, in this paper, we analyze the fitting confidence intervals of the solar wind velocity, and present some preliminary results achieved using FAST, which points to the current FAST system being highly capable of carrying out observations of IPS