Last Wednesday the National Academy of Sciences held a press
conference in Washington, DC, to introduce its newly completed
report on priorities for the coming decade in solar and space
physics. Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado chaired the
committee that wrote the report. Thomas Zurbuchen of the
University of Michigan was the vice chair. Together, they
summarized the report’s highlights for the assembled reporters,
scientists, and bureaucrats. Like its counterparts in astronomy
and planetary science, the latest solar and space physics
decadal survey is more than just a shopping list of missions and
facilities. Its authors begin by defining their field in a broad
and inspiring way: We live on a planet whose orbit traverses the
tenuous outer atmosphere of a variable magnetic star, the Sun.
This stellar atmosphere is a rapidly flowing plasma—the solar
wind—that envelops Earth as it rushes outward, creating a cavity
in the galaxy that extends to some 140 astronomical units (AU).
There, the inward pressu