The Solar Optical Telescope for the Hinode Mission: An Overview
Ichimoto, K.; Tsuneta, S.; Suematsu, Y.; Katsukawa, Y.; Shimizu, T.; Nagata, S.; Title, A.; Otsubo, M.; Nakagiri, M.; Noguchi, M.; Tarbell, T.; Shine, R.; Rosenberg, W.; Hoffmann, C.; Jurcevich, B.; Kushner, G.; Levay, M.; Lites, B.; Elmore, D.; Matsushita, T.; Kawaguchi, N.; Saito, H.; Mikami, I.; Hill, L. D.; Owens, J. K.
Japan, United States
Abstract
The Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) aboard the Hinode satellite (formerly called Solar-B) consists of the Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA) and the Focal Plane Package (FPP). The OTA is a 50-cm diffraction-limited Gregorian telescope, and the FPP includes the narrowband filtergraph (NFI) and the broadband filtergraph (BFI), plus the Stokes Spectro-Polarimeter (SP). The SOT provides unprecedented high-resolution photometric and vector magnetic images of the photosphere and chromosphere with a very stable point spread function and is equipped with an image-stabilization system with performance better than 0.01 arcsec rms. Together with the other two instruments on Hinode (the X-Ray Telescope (XRT) and the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS)), the SOT is poised to address many fundamental questions about solar magnetohydrodynamics. This paper provides an overview; the details of the instrument are presented in a series of companion papers.