China pilots opening quasi real-time solar exploration data to public

China started to pilot providing quasi real-time observation data from its first solar exploration satellite to home and abroad users starting this past Wednesday.

The data first available to users covered the observation data from the satellite-loaded Solar Hard X-ray Imager, partial observation data from the All-Solar Vector Magnetic Imager, partial observation data from the Lehmann Alpha Solar Telescope since April 1 and their subsequent quasi real-time observation data, according to the Purple Mountain Observatory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences based in East China's Jiangsu province.

Gan Weiqun, the satellite's principal scientist from PMO, said that after about six months of debugging in orbit, the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S) -- nicknamed Kuafu 1 in Chinese -- has obtained approximately 80TB of raw solar observation data.