ASCAO - ASCA Proposals

Overview

The ASCAO database contains the listing of accepted targets from all proposals submitted in repsonse to the ASCA Guest Observer (GO) Announcements of Opportunities (AOs), as well as the targets that were selected for the Performance Verification (PV) phase. The current version of ASCAO includes all accepted targets from AOs 1 through 8.5 inclusive. Notice that, since the accepted targets include Priority 3 ones of which only a fraction have or will actually be observed, some of the listed targets in this database will never have been observed. To obtain more detailed information about the status of particular targets, please consult either the Master ASCA database table (ASCAMASTER) or the ASCA Observing Log database table (ASCALOG).

Provenance

This database was last updated in August 2000 based on information provided by the ASCA Project.

Data Products

The single data product associated with the entries in this table is an ASCII file that contains the proposal abstract.

ASCA Description

The Astro-D satellite was successfully launched on February 20, 1993, at 11:00 JST (02;00 UT) from Kagoshima Space Center. The satellite was named ASCA (the Japanese characters for it mean a "flying bird", or it is an acronym of an "Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics").

ASCA (Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics; formerly Astro-D) is Japan's fourth x-ray astronomy mission and the second for which the U.S. is providing a significant part of the scientific payload. Its four large-area telescopes focus x-rays from a wide energy range onto a pair each of x-ray sensitive Charge-Coupled Devices (CCD's) and imaging Gas Scintillation Proportional Counters (GSPC's). ASCA is examining a variety of x-ray sources with moderate spatial resolution and spectral resolution, with particular emphasis on the iron K band.

Quoted from the PDMP:

The two identical x-ray CCD cameras on board ASCA are known as the Solid-state Imaging Spectrometers (SIS) and were provided by a hardware team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Osaka University, and Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS). Each CCD camera head is based around four $420 \times 422$ pixel MIT Lincoln Laboratory CCD chips abutted side by side, with four preamplifiers, front-side illuminated. The field of view of each camera is $22 \times 22$ arcminutes. Since the SIS is the first x-ray CCD spectrometer on orbit, its resistance to radiation damage will be fully established as the mission progresses.

Each Gas Imaging Spectrometer (GIS) is a Xenon-filled imaging gas scintillation proportional counter; these two instruments were provided by the University of Tokyo and ISAS. The GIS complements the SIS: above the Xenon L edge ($\approx 5$ keV), the GIS has a detection efficiency that is both greater than the SIS and falls off less rapidly. The GIS, with a circular field of view of radius 25 arcminutes, observes about 4 times the area than covered by the SIS.

The high throughput X-Ray Telescopes (XRT's) utilize multiply-nested, thin foil, conical mirrors. The XRT's were supplied by GSFC, Nagoya University and ISAS, and provide a spatial resolution of $\sim$ 1.5 arc minutes (half-power radius) and a broad bandpass, 0.1-10 keV.

ASCA is the first x-ray imaging mission operating between 0.5 and 12 keV with high energy resolution (8 and 2 percent at 5.9 keV for the GSPC's and CCD's, respectively). It observes typically one or two sources per day. These combined capabilities enable a diverse and exciting program of astronomical research.

Parameters

Sequence_Number
The sequence number.

Name
The name of the target.

RA
The Right Ascension of the target.

Dec
The Declination of the target.

LII
The galactic longitude of the target.

BII
The galactic latitude of the target.

PI
The last name of the Principal Investigator.

Fname_PI
The first name of the Principal Investigator.

Country
The country of the PI's institution.

PNo
The proposal number.

Tno
The target number within the original proposal.

AO_Number
The AO number.

Duration
Total observing time in kiloseconds (ks): 1 ks = 1000 s.

Constraint_Flag

Priority
Priority from the highest (1) to the lowest (3): notice that priority 3 targets are not guaranteed to actually be observed.

Co_PI
The last name of the co-PI.

Fname_Co_PI
The first name of the co-PI.

File_Name
Proposal abstract filename

Class
BROWSE classification.

Holdover
Holdover flag. (The parameter is deprecated and no longer populated.)

Contact Person

Questions regarding the ASCAO database table can be addressed to the HEASARC Help Desk.

Page Author: Browse Software Development Team
Last Modified: Monday, 16-Sep-2024 17:24:26 EDT