{"id":516071,"date":"2026-03-03T13:42:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T13:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/516071\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T13:42:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T13:42:11","slug":"change-typhoon-intensity-and-path-china-team-mulls-hitting-cyclones-with-space-beam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/516071\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Change typhoon intensity and path\u2019: China team mulls hitting cyclones with space beam"},"content":{"rendered":"

China should accelerate development of a space-based solar power station<\/a>, as the technology could one day do far more than beam clean energy to Earth, it might even help tame typhoons<\/a>, according to a senior Chinese engineer.Duan Baoyan<\/a>, the lead scientist behind the ambitious \u201cZhuri\u201d project \u2013 which aims to hold a megawatt-class demonstration in the Earth\u2019s orbit by 2030 \u2013 said microwave beams generated by such a station to transmit electricity back to Earth could potentially be directed to heat moisture inside storm systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the energy output were high enough, it could alter regional atmospheric circulation and change a typhoon\u2019s intensity and path,\u201d Duan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Xidian University in Xian, northwestern China, wrote in state-run People\u2019s Daily on Monday.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

02:38<\/p>\n

Why are typhoons and other extreme weather events on the rise in Asia?<\/p>\n

Why are typhoons and other extreme weather events on the rise in Asia?<\/p>\n

He added that the plant could also charge satellites, space stations and deep-space probes, allowing them to operate for longer and travel farther. \u201cFuture space internet networks or even lunar bases may rely on this \u2018space-based power bank\u2019 technology,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

First proposed by Duan and his colleagues in 2013, the Zhuri (\u201cchasing the sun\u201d) project ultimately envisions building a kilometre-scale circular solar power station in geostationary orbit, about 36,000km (22,370 miles) above Earth, capable of generating gigawatt-level electricity.<\/p>\n

In 2022, his team built a 75-metre-tall test tower on campus to simulate the entire process on Earth, including tracking the sun, concentrating light, converting it into electricity, turning that electricity into microwaves, beaming it across a distance, and converting it back into electricity at a receiving antenna.<\/p>\n

Since then, the ground-based system has reached new technical milestones, including what Duan described as \u201cone-to-many transmission\u201d, allowing a single microwave transmitter to send power to multiple moving receivers at the same time rather than just one fixed target.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China should accelerate development of a space-based solar power station, as the technology could one day do far…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,66170,512,258000,129,8523,941,19409,167643,21723,217856,128,285,258001,34788,1055,257999,258002],"class_list":{"0":"post-516071","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-california-institute-of-technology","11":"tag-china","12":"tag-duan-baoyan","13":"tag-earth","14":"tag-international-space-station","15":"tag-japan","16":"tag-ministry-of-industry-and-information-technology","17":"tag-national-natural-science-foundation-of-china","18":"tag-peoples-daily","19":"tag-peter-glaser","20":"tag-science","21":"tag-space","22":"tag-space-based-solar-power-station","23":"tag-typhoons","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-xidian-university","26":"tag-zhuri"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}