Solar Surveyors: Observing the Sun from Space

This book is all about the Sun-its main characteristics, how it impacts our planet, and what space exploration has taught us about our life-giving star from the 20th century to the present day. Richly illustrated with mission photos, design diagrams, and infocharts, it will be a fascinating read for anybody interested in the Sun and our attempts to research it. The first section of the book describes what we have learned about the Sun using equipment located right here on our planet. Additionally, it includes a digestible overview of solar physics, helping to familiarize readers with how the Sun operates and how it affects our planet. This launches us into the meat of the story in the next section, which provides a detailed account of the many incredible solar missions launched over the decades, including SOHO and the Parker Solar Probe, and their critical contributions to solar physics. Along the way, we will explore the deep space environment and the discovery of the solar wind, while closer to home, we will take a look at the Sun-Earth interaction and newly discovered solar phenomena such as microflares. Explained throughout the chapters are the complex instruments that made such missions possible as well as current mission plans for the next wave of solar physics research.