SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA to study the Sun, from its deep core to the outer corona, and the solar wind. To achieve its scientific goals it carries a complement of twelve sophisticated, state-of-the-art instruments. Three helioseismology instruments are expected to provide unique data for the study of the structure and dynamics of the solar interior, from the very deep core to the outermost layers of the convection zone. A set of five complementary remote sensing instruments, consisting of EUV and UV imagers, spectrographs and coronagraphs, will give us our first comprehensive view of the outer solar atmosphere and corona, leading to a better understanding of the enigmatic coronal heating and solar wind acceleration processes. Finally, three experiments will complement the remote sensing observations by making in-situ measurements of the composition and energy of the solar wind and charged energetic particles. This volume contains detailed descriptions of all the twelve instruments on board SOHO. Also included are an overview paper and a description of the SOHO ground system, science operations and data products. The aim of these papers is to make the broader scientific community, and in particular potential guest investigators, aware of the scientific objectives and capabilities of the SOHO payload and to provide a reference document for the various instruments.

In February 2004, the President announced a new goal for NASA; to use humans and robots together to explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond. In response to this initiative, NASA has adopted new exploration goals that depend, in part, on solar physics research. These actions raised questions about how the research agenda recommended by the NRC in its 2002 report, The Sun to the Earth and Beyond, which did not reflect the new exploration goals, would be affected. As a result, NASA requested the NRC to review the role solar and space physics should play in support of the new goals. This report presents the results of that review. It considers solar and space physics both as aspects of scientific exploration and in support of enabling future exploration of the solar system. The report provides a series of recommendations about NASA's Sun-Earth Connections program to enable it to meet both of those goals.

This is a follow-on book to the introductory textbook "Physics of the Solar Corona" previously published in 2004 by the same author, which provided a systematic introduction and covered mostly scientific results from the pre-2000 era. Using a similar structure as the previous book the second volume provides a seamless continuation of numerous novel research results in solar physics that emerged in the new millennium (after 2000) from the new solar missions of RHESSI, STEREO, Hinode, CORONAS, and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) during the era of 2000-2018. The new solar space missions are characterized by unprecedented high-resolution imaging, time resolution, spectral capabilities, stereoscopy and tomography, which reveal the intricate dynamics of magneto-hydrodynamic processes in the solar corona down to scales of 100 km. The enormous amount of data streaming down from SDO in Terabytes per day requires advanced automated data processing methods. The book focuses exclusively on new research results after 2000, which are reviewed in a comprehensive manner, documented by over 3600 literature references, covering theory, observations, and numerical modeling of basic physical processes that are observed in high-temperature plasmas of the Sun and other astrophysical objects, such as plasma instabilities, coronal heating, magnetic reconnection processes, coronal mass ejections, plasma waves and oscillations, or particle acceleration.