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.