Understanding how the Sun changes though its 11-year sunspot cycle and how these changes affect the vast space around the Sun – the heliosphere – has been one of the principal objectives of space research since the advent of the space age. This book presents the evolution of the heliosphere through an entire solar activity cycle. The last solar cycle (cycle 23) has been the best observed from both the Earth and from a fleet of spacecraft. Of these, the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses probe has provided continuous observations of the state of the heliosphere since 1990 from a unique vantage point, that of a nearly polar orbit around the Sun. Ulysses’ results affect our understanding of the heliosphere from the interior of the Sun to the interstellar medium - beyond the outer boundary of the heliosphere. Written by scientists closely associated with the Ulysses mission, the book describes and explains the many different aspects of changes in the heliosphere in response to solar activity. In particular, the authors describe the rise in solar activity from the last minimum in solar activity in 1996 to its maximum in 2000 and the subsequent decline in activity.

Understanding how the Sun changes though its 11-year sunspot cycle and how these changes affect the vast space around the Sun – the heliosphere – has been one of the principal objectives of space research since the advent of the space age. This book presents the evolution of the heliosphere through an entire solar activity cycle. The last solar cycle (cycle 23) has been the best observed from both the Earth and from a fleet of spacecraft. Of these, the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses probe has provided continuous observations of the state of the heliosphere since 1990 from a unique vantage point, that of a nearly polar orbit around the Sun. Ulysses’ results affect our understanding of the heliosphere from the interior of the Sun to the interstellar medium - beyond the outer boundary of the heliosphere. Written by scientists closely associated with the Ulysses mission, the book describes and explains the many different aspects of changes in the heliosphere in response to solar activity. In particular, the authors describe the rise in solar activity from the last minimum in solar activity in 1996 to its maximum in 2000 and the subsequent decline in activity.

In 2010, NASA and the National Science Foundation asked the National Research Council to assemble a committee of experts to develop an integrated national strategy that would guide agency investments in solar and space physics for the years 2013-2022. That strategy, the result of nearly 2 years of effort by the survey committee, which worked with more than 100 scientists and engineers on eight supporting study panels, is presented in the 2013 publication, Solar and Space Physics: A Science for a Technological Society. This booklet, designed to be accessible to a broader audience of policymakers and the interested public, summarizes the content of that report.

over to nominal operations and began making our groundbreaking science observations. Remarkably, the IBEX project was able to do all this work including developing an entirely new launch capability, building and ying a unique and highly specialized spacecraft and instrument suite, and maintaining full funding for our Education and Public Outreach and Phase E science activities, while still under-running our original cost cap (as modi ed by NASA-directed changes), by roughly three-quarters of a million dollars. This book comprises a set of papers that describe the IBEX science, instruments, and mission and put these in the context of the existing knowledge of the interstellar interaction at the time of the launch. The book sets the stage for research that will be based on data from the IBEX mission. We sincerely hope that future researchers, authors and students will use this information to help in their studies. Chapter 1 [McComas et al. ] provides an overview of the entire IBEX program including the IBEX science, hardware, and mission. Chapter 2 describes the IBEX spacecraft and ight system [Scherrer et al. ]. Chapters 3–4 provide the details of the IBEX-Hi instrument [Funsten et al. ] and background monitor that is built into it [Allegrini et al. ], while Chapters 5–7 describe the IBEX-Lo instrument [Fuselier et al. ], how IBEX-Lo can measure the interstellar neutrals directly entering the heliosphere [Möbius et al.

Cosmogenic radionuclides are radioactive isotopes which are produced by natural processes and distributed within the Earth system. With a holistic view of the environment the authors show in this book how cosmogenic radionuclides can be used to trace and to reconstruct the history of a large variety of processes. They discuss the way in which cosmogenic radionuclides can assist in the quantification of complex processes in the present-day environment. The book aims to demonstrate to the reader the strength of analytic tools based on cosmogenic radionuclides, their contribution to almost any field of modern science, and how these tools may assist in the solution of many present and future problems that we face here on Earth. The book provides a comprehensive discussion of the basic principles behind the applications of cosmogenic (and other) radionuclides as environmental tracers and dating tools. The second section of the book discusses in some detail the production of radionuclides by cosmic radiation, their transport and distribution in the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, their storage in natural archives, and how they are measured. The third section of the book presents a number of examples selected to illustrate typical tracer and dating applications in a number of different spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, biosphere, solar physics and astronomy). At the same time the authors have outlined the limitations of the use of cosmogenic radionuclides. Written on a level understandable by graduate students without specialist skills in physics or mathematics, the book addresses a wide audience, ranging from archaeology, biophysics, and geophysics, to atmospheric physics, hydrology, astrophysics and space science.

This volume helps the reader to understand the ways and means of how dynamical phenomena are generated at the Sun, how they travel through the Heliosphere, and how they affect Earth. It provides an integrated account of the three principal chains of events all the way from the Sun to Earth: the normal solar wind, coronal mass ejections, and solar energetic particles.