ASO-S Mission: Inflight Performance and First Results

The Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) is China’s first comprehensive mission dedicated to solar research. It was successfully launched on October 9, 2022. This book is a reprint of a collection of articles originally published in the journal of Solar Physics, comprising 30 papers that present the in-flight performance and early scientific results of ASO-S, with data collected up to March 15, 2024. Together, these papers provide an overview of the mission’s progress during the first one and a half years after the launch. Earlier studies on the mission and its instruments, conducted prior to launch, can be found primarily in special issues of RAA (2019, Vol. 19, No. 11) and Acta Astronomica Sinica (2020, Vol. 61, No. 4). Additional related research has also appeared in journals such as ApJ, A&A, and MNRAS.

ASO-S aims to investigate the relationships between the solar magnetic field, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). It is equipped with three onboard instruments: the Full-disc vector MagnetoGraph (FMG), the Hard X-ray Imager (HXI), and the Lyman-alpha Solar Telescope (LST), which are designed to observe the solar magnetic field, solar flare hard X-ray emissions, and the formation and propagation of CMEs, respectively. The book is organized into four parts. Part One includes five papers detailing the mission’s final technical configuration prior to launch, the first-light results, the in-flight performance and calibration of FMG, HXI, and LST, and the mission’s data center. The remaining three parts are each devoted to scientific research based on observations from FMG, HXI, and LST, respectively.

Reprinted from Solar Physics, Topical Collection: ASO-S Mission: Inflight Performance and First Results.

Dr. Weiqun Gan earned his PhD (1989) in the Department of Astronomy at Nanjing University. Following his education, he joined the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and was promoted to full professor in 1995. From 2004 to 2014, he served as Deputy Director of PMO. For many years, his research has focused on solar flares through modeling the atmosphere, hydrodynamics, spectroscopy, and high-energy solar physics. He has been actively involved in nearly every project aimed at advancing space-based solar observations in China. In 2011, he proposed the mission concept for ASO-S and led its pre-study from 2011 to 2013. From 2014 to 2016, he led the background development of the mission. In late 2017, ASO-S was formally established by CAS, with Gan appointed as the Chief Scientist for the mission. To date, he has authored/co-authored around 300 publications, including the monograph titled High Energy Solar Physics (2002, Science Press, in Chinese).

Dr. John Leibacher is a solar physicist, working primarily on atmospheric dynamics and helioseismology, who was previously at the National Solar Observatory (NSO), in Tucson, Arizona, USA for many years where he was director and director of the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), and he is currently at the  Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, Université de Paris–Saclay, Orsay, France and  the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.  He has been actively involved in a number of space missions.  He served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Solar Physics for 19 years and he previously served for a number of years on the Editorial Committee of the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Dr. Cristina H. Mandrini is a Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been the head of the Solar Physics Group in this institution for more than 20 years and Assistant and Associate Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires for 17 years. She is interested in solar active phenomena, their origin, magnetic field modelling, topology calculation, and their impact in the interplanetary medium. She is full member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales since 2018, in which she is the present President of the Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy Section, and a member of its Board of Directors, as well as full member of The World Academy of Sciences. She has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Solar Physics since 2016.

Dr. Lidia van Driel-Gesztelyi is a solar physicist, working on the formation and evolution of solar active regions and their magnetic activity phenomena (e.g. flares and coronal mass ejections), magnetic helicity, coronal heating, elemental composition of the solar corona, and the origin of the solar wind. She is Emeritus Professor of Space and Climate Physics at University College London, UK, and Emeritus Researcher at Konkoly Observatory, Hungary. She has served in various leadership roles in the International Astronomical Union. She was awarded the Service Award of the Royal Astronomical Society, UK, Doctor Honoris Causa of Paris Observatory, France, and Order of Merit of Hungary. She has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Solar Physics since 2005 and served for five years on the Editorial Committee of the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics.