On October 30-31, 2014 ISSI-Beijing hosted another very successful forum with the title of ‘Exploring Solar Eruptions and their Origins'. 27 leading scientists from around the world participated in this meeting convened by Weiqun Gan (PMO, China), Säm Krucker (FHNW, Switzerland/UC Berkeley, USA), Haimin Wang (NJIT, USA), Yihua Yan (NAOC, China) and Maurizio Falanga (ISSI-Beijing, China).

The forum’s main aims were to discuss the current status of the research progress on the relationships among magnetic fields, solar flares and coronal mass ejections and to identify relevant results acquired by current missions. The debate mainly focused on the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S), its key science goals and mission definition, as well as some of the key technological issues. ASO-S is one of the candidate missions for advanced studies in the space science program of the Chinese Academy of Science, with regard to complementary missions.

After starting with recognizing the key scientific objectives for exploring solar eruptions, the forum continued with an overview of the achievements of current relevant missions like Solar Orbiter and SDO. Furthermore, new possibilities for observations of solar active phenomena were being discussed among the experts, in order to finally review the planed instruments and satellites for ASO-S. The scientists concluded the very successful meeting with defining the mission’s requirements.

An issue of TAIKONG, the ISSI-BJ magazine will be devoted to the insight gained at this forum and distributed to the science communities and space science institutions.