Introduction

We will learn:

Acceleration of the Solar Wind

What plasma processes heat the corona and accelerate the solar wind.
What phenomena on the solar surface drive the plasma heating and acceleration processes.
How the Sun regulates the steady properties of the fast solar wind.
Why the slow solar wind is filamentary and what determines the properties of the plasma in each filament.
How changes in the solar magnetic field determine the launching and magnetic structure of Coronal Mass Ejections.
How the sources of the fast and slow solar wind and CMEs evolve with the solar cycle.
Why there are coronal holes.

Heliospheric Structure and Dynamics

How the large-scale structure of the heliosphere changes as the polarity of the solar magnetic field reverses and a new polarity is established.
How the large-scale structure and the microscopic plasma properties evolve together with distance from the Sun.
What happens to coronal mass ejections as they interact with the ambient solar wind.
How interstellar neutral atoms, ionized in the solar wind, are incorporated into the wind and become the source of the anomalous cosmic rays.

Interaction with the Interstellar Medium

How the solar wind slows down: whether in a shock, in a shock modified by energetic particles, or in a slow transition dominated by the acceleration process. If it is a shock, how strong it is.
Where that transition occurs will indicate the limits on the interstellar magnetic field strength and the size of the heliosphere.
Whether the anomalous cosmic rays are accelerated at the shock, as predicted.
The physics of the largest accessible collisionless plasma shock, as ground-truth for other sources of energetic particles in the Universe.
Nature of the heliosheath region beyond the shock.
Possibly the first measurements of the interstellar magnetic field, energetic particles and plasma waves.
What happens at the interaction with the interstellar medium.
What the composition and state of the real interstellar medium are.