- After successfully integrating its under-construction Space Station and approving the next phase of its lunar missions, China has launched a new observatory that will look into the Sun. The Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) was launched onboard a Long March-2D rocket.
- Nicknamed Kuafu-1, after a giant in Chinese mythology who chased the sun, the observatory has been placed in an orbit about 720 kilometers above the planet, higher than the orbit of the International Space Station.
- The observatory, which is about 859 kilograms, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China.
- After four to six months of testing, the 859-kg satellite will start normal operation 720 kilometers away from the Earth to study the causality between the solar magnetic field and two major eruptive phenomena, namely solar flares and coronal mass ejections, thus providing data support for space weather forecasting.
- Kuafu-1, with three payloads onboard — the Lyman-alpha Solar Telescope (LST), the Hard X-ray Imager (HXI), and the Full-disk Vector MagnetoGraph (FMG) — is an all-rounder satellite specially designed for solar detection.
- It marked the second milestone for the country’s solar exploration endeavor after the satellite Xihe, a pathfinder in China’s solar exploration, was launched into space in October 2021.
Kuafu-1 satellite launched by China to unravel secrets of the Sun
