Suzaku - The fifth Japanese X-ray Astronomy Mission

Suzaku (previously called Astro-E2) was launched on 2005 July 10 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in collaboration with U.S. (NASA/GSFC and MIT) and Japanese institutes. Suzaku covers the energy range 0.3-600 keV and is currently performing astronomical observations using imaging CCD cameras (XIS) and a hard X-ray detector (HXD).

Suzaku brings new capabilities to observe all classes of astronomical objects including active galactic nuclei, clusters of galaxies, stars, supernova remnants, X-ray binaries and solar system objects. After a nine month performance verification phase, Suzaku began operating as an observatory, open to the world-wide astronomical community.

Since the start of open time observations, JAXA has kindly offered to allocate 8% of the open observing time to proposals from scientists from institutes located in the ESA Member States. The European proposals are first peer-reviewed by an ESA-appointed Time Allocation Committee and the recommended proposals forwarded to JAXA for merging with those resulting from the parallel Japanese and US calls.

The Tenth Announcement of Opportunity for observations to be performed between April 2015 and October 2016 (EAO-10) has now closed and the results are available from the menu link at the left of this page.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) decided to complete the scientific mission of the X-ray Astronomy Satellite "Suzaku" (ASTRO-EII) after carefully considering the condition of the satellite.

The Suzaku data archive containing all public data is available.