Since its October 2008 launch, NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has mapped the invisible interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, surpassing its mission objectives with images that reveal the interactions between our home in the galaxy and interstellar space to be surprisingly structured and intense.

Less than two years later, its science program has also flourished into multiple research studies extending way beyond the original scope of the mission.

On August 1st, the sun emitted a C-class solar flare that spawned what scientists call a coronal mass ejection, or CME, headed toward Earth. The CME impacted Earth's magnetic field August 3rd. CMEs occasionally hit Earth. This CME will have few noticeable consequences beyond producing an aurorae.

The CME hit Earth's magnetic field on August 3rd at 17:40 UTC. The impact sparked a G2-class geomagnetic storm that lasted nearly 12 hours -- time enough for auroras to spread all the way from Europe to North America.

The CNES microsatellite with its SODISM (SOlar Diameter Imager and Surface Mapper) 11-cm-diameter telescope, the nerve centre of the Picard observation system, has returned its first image of the Sun, dated 22 July, just one month after the satellite was placed in orbit.

Teams on the ground will use this image to make final adjustments before the science mission begins. The SODISM instrument is operating perfectly.

ESA's pioneering Cluster mission is celebrating its 10th anniversary. During the past decade, Cluster's four satellites have provided extraordinary insights into the largely invisible interaction between the Sun and Earth.

Cluster's four satellites, Rumba, Samba, Salsa, and Tango, fly in formation around Earth to provide a 3D picture of how the continuous 'solar wind' of charged particles or plasma from the Sun affects our near-Earth space environment and its protective 'magnetic bubble, known as the magnetosphere.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) would like to announce that we have confirmed the successful acceleration of the Small Solar Power Sail Demonstrator "IKAROS" by photon in the course of determining its precise orbit after its sail deployment.

The IKAROS was launched by JAXA on May 21, 2010 and has been under operation since then.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully took images of the whole solar sail of the Small Solar Power Sail Demonstrator "IKAROS" after its deployment of a separation camera on June 15. The IKAROS was launched on May 21, 2010 (JST) from the Tanegashima Space Center.

The separation camera is in a cylindrical shape of about 6 cm both in diameter and height. It was detached from the satellite using a spring to take images and sent them to the satellite through radio waves.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has allowed scientists for the first time to comprehensively view the dynamic nature of storms on the sun. Solar storms have been recognized as a cause of technological problems on Earth since the invention of the telegraph in the 19th century.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), one of three instruments aboard SDO, allowed scientists to discover that even minor solar events are never truly small scale. Shortly after AIA opened its doors on March 30, scientists observed a large eruptive prominence on the sun's edge, followed by a filament eruption a third of the way across the star's disk from the eruption.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) passed a major milestone on May 14, when it completed its post-launch check out and officially began its five-year science mission to study the sun.

During a commissioning ceremony held in the SDO Mission Operations Center at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., mission engineers declared that the spacecraft has transitioned fully from engineering operations into science operations. All three of the instruments aboard have successfully passed their on-orbit checkout, have been calibrated, and are now taking science data.

The series of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites known as GOES provide daily satellite images of weather here on Earth, but they also provide scientists with solar data and space weather observations in geosynchronous (over a fixed location on Earth's surface) orbit.

NASA has just released a four-minute educational video called "A Weather Satellite Watches the Sun" explaining the uses of space weather instruments on the GOES satellites.

NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun's dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

Using data from the completed ESA/NASA Ulysses mission, scientists have identified a new candidate for biggest comet.

The primary mission of the Ulysses spacecraft was to characterize the sun's heliosphere as a function of solar latitude. The heliosphere is the vast region of interplanetary space occupied by the sun's atmosphere and dominated by the outflow of the solar wind.

Scientists from the University of Leicester have used observations from NASA's STEREO and ACE satellites to come up with more accurate predictions of when blasts of solar wind will reach Earth, Venus and Mars.

We have recently been experiencing an unusually quiet and long-lasting solar minimum, and solar storms caused by Coronal Mass Ejections have been scarce. Despite this, high pressure pulses of solar wind, called Coronal Interaction Regions (CIRs) have been keeping the space weather unpredictable.

Using the Cluster spacecraft, scientists from University College London (UCL) have made the first direct observations of charged particles that lead to some of the brightest aurora. The aurora, or northern and southern lights, are caused by highly energetic charged particles, normally held in space by Earth's magnetic field, colliding with Earth's upper atmosphere.

As these high-energy particles collide with molecules in the atmosphere they lose energy, causing the atmospheric molecules to glow and heating the atmosphere. The result of is spectacular displays of shimmering curtains of red, green and blue light normally seen above the polar regions, but occasionally seen as far south as northern England.

After the most profound lull in solar activity for nearly a century, the Sun is finally coming back to life. But will the solar activity return to previous levels? ESA's venerable solar watchdog SOHO is there, watching and measuring, providing unique information about our nearest star.

It was the perfect Christmas present for solar physicists. In mid-December 2009, the largest group of sunspots to emerge for several years manifested itself on the solar surface. It occurred just as some solar physicists were beginning to wonder if large sunspots would ever return.

Take a bunch of fast-moving electrons, place them in orbit and then hit them with the shock waves from a solar storm. What do you get? Killer electrons. That's the shocking recipe revealed by ESA's Cluster mission.

Killer electrons are highly energetic particles trapped in Earth's outer radiation belt, which extends from 12 000 km to 64 000 km above the planet's surface. During solar storms their number grows at least ten times and they can be dislodged, posing a threat to satellites. As the name suggests, killer electrons are energetic enough to penetrate satellite shielding and cause microscopic lightning strikes. If these electrical discharges take place in vital components, the satellite can be damaged or even rendered inoperable.