NASA's upcoming mission to study the sun in unprecedented detail and its effects on Earth, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla. on July 9.

The spacecraft left NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on July 7, where it was built and tested.

In 2008, Ulysses was expected to cease functioning due to weakening power. But solid engineering know-how and on-the-fly innovation have eked out an additional year of important science returns, which came to an end yesterday.

Ulysses, the joint ESA/NASA solar orbiter mission, finally ended yesterday when ground controllers sent commands to shut down the satellite's communications. The event marks the conclusion of one of the longest and most successful space missions ever conducted.

Upon receipt of the last command from Earth, the transmitter on Ulysses will switch off on 30 June, bringing one of the most successful and longest missions in spaceflight history to an end.

After 18.6 years in space and defying several earlier expectations of its demise, the joint ESA/NASA solar orbiter Ulysses will achieve 'end of mission' on 30 June 2009. The final communication pass with a ground station will start at 15:35 UTC and run until 20:20 UTC or until the final command is issued to switch the satellite's radio communications into 'monitor only' mode. No further contact with Ulysses is planned.

Over almost nine years in space, the four Cluster satellites have returned a wealth of science data including insights into improving radio searches for exoplanets, energetic vortices tunnelling into Earth's protective magnetic bubble, and 3D magnetic dances in near-Earth space.

The satellites are in good health as they continue exploring new regions of space.

Southwest Research Institute has received confirmation from NASA Headquarters that the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) misson has been approved to begin its implementation phase.

MMS will perform a definitive investigation of one of the most basic and important physical processes in the universe -- magnetic reconnection. The mission is scheduled to launch in August 2014.

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence.

During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour. Its companion sensor, IBEX-Lo, built by Lockheed Martin, the University of New Hampshire, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, measures atoms with speeds from about one hundred thousand to 1.5 million mph.

Using data from NASA's THEMIS mission, a team of University of Alberta researchers has pinpointed the impact epicenter of an earthbound space storm as it crashes into the atmosphere, and given an advance warning of its arrival.

The team's study reveals that magnetic blast waves can be used to pinpoint and predict the location where space storms dissipate their massive amounts of energy. These storms can dump the equivalent of 50 gigawatts of power, or the output of 10 of the world's largest power stations, into Earth's atmosphere.

NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft has spotted the first major activity of the new solar cycle. On May 5 STEREO-B observed a Type II radio burst and a bright, fast coronal mass ejection (CME) emanating from the far side of the sun. The activity originated in a solar active region that rotated into view from Earth on May 8.

A Type II radio burst is a discharge of radio waves that are emitted when shocks are accelerated by a CME -- the sudden eruption of energy and solar material.

Scientists using NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft have discovered how radio waves produced by electrons injected into Earth's near-space environment both generate and remove high-speed "killer" electrons.

Killer electrons are born within Earth's natural radiation belts, called the Van Allen belts after their discoverer, James Van Allen. Killer electrons are mostly found in the outer belt, which over the equator begins approximately 8,000 miles above Earth and tapers off about 28,000 miles high.

Scientists have found that extreme solar activity drastically compresses the magnetosphere and modifies the composition of ions in near-Earth space. They are now looking to model how these changes affect orbiting satellites, including the GPS system.

The results were obtained from coordinated in-situ measurements performed by ESA's four Cluster satellites along with the two Chinese/ESA Double Star satellites.

'Sigmoids' are S-shaped structures found in the outer atmosphere of the Sun (the corona), seen with X-ray telescopes and thought to be a crucial part of explosive events like solar flares. Now a group of astronomers have developed the first model to reproduce and explain the nature of the different stages of a sigmoid's life.

Recently, the X-Ray Telescope (XRT) on board the Hinode space mission was used to obtain the first images of the formation and eruption phase of a sigmoid at high resolution.

Twin NASA spacecraft have provided scientists with their first view of the speed, trajectory, and three-dimensional shape of powerful explosions from the sun known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. This new capability will dramatically enhance scientists' ability to predict if and how these solar tsunamis could affect Earth.

When directed toward our planet, these ejections can be breathtakingly beautiful and yet potentially cause damaging effects worldwide. The brightly colored phenomena known as auroras -- more commonly called Northern or Southern Lights -- are examples of Earth's upper atmosphere harmlessly being disturbed by a CME. However, ejections can produce a form of solar cosmic rays that can be hazardous to spacecraft, astronauts and technology on Earth.

Two places on opposite sides of Earth may hold the secret to how the moon was born. NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft are about to enter these zones, known as the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, each centered about 93 million miles away along Earth's orbit.

As rare as free parking in New York City, L4 and L5 are among the special points in our solar system around which spacecraft and other objects can loiter. They are where the gravitational pull of a nearby planet or the sun balances the forces from the object's orbital motion. Such points closer to Earth are sometimes used as spaceship "parking lots", like the L1 point a million miles away in the direction of the sun. They are officially called Libration points or Lagrangian points after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an Italian-French mathematician who helped discover them.

Following two months of commissioning, during which the spacecraft and sensors were tuned for optimum mission performance, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft began gathering data to build the first maps of the edge of the heliosphere, the region of space influenced by the Sun.

IBEX is using energetic neutral atom (ENA) imaging to create the first global maps of interactions between the million mile-per-hour solar wind blown out in all directions by the Sun and the low-density material between the stars, known as the interstellar medium.

Following a successful confirmation review, NASA has given the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) the go-ahead to continue development of the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, or RBSP mission. APL will build and operate the twin probes that will study the radiation belts surrounding Earth, with a primary mission of two years.

"This is a very important milestone in the mission life cycle," says Rick Fitzgerald, RBSP project manager at APL. "It validates all the terrific work performed by the RBSP team for the last three years. We are looking forward to a successful detailed design phase."