From the Heliosphere into the Sun
- Sailing Against the Wind -

A meeting dedicated to the progress of our understanding of the solar wind and the corona in the light of the upcoming Solar Orbiter mission.

This meeting was dedicated to the processes in the solar wind and corona in the light of the upcoming Solar Orbiter mission. Over the last three decades there has been astonishing progress in our understanding of the solar corona and the inner heliosphere driven by remote-sensing and in-situ observations. This period of time has seen the first high-resolution X-ray and EUV observations of the corona and the first detailed measurements of the ion and electron velocity distribution functions in the inner heliosphere. Today we know that we have to treat the corona and the wind as one single object, which calls for a mission that is fully designed to investigate the interwoven processes all the way from the solar surface to the heliosphere.

The meeting provided a forum to review the advances over the last decades, relate them to our current understanding and to discuss future directions. We concentrated one day on in-situ observations and related models of the inner heliosphere, and spent another day on remote sensing observations and modeling of the corona -- always with an eye on the symbiotic nature of the two. On the third day we directed our view towards the future.

This meeting was timely because we have experienced on 4 October 2011 the final selection and approval of the Solar Orbiter mission for a launch in 2017. Last but not least took the opportunity of this meeting to celebrate the career of Eckart Marsch, who was one of the major drivers of Solar Orbiter and its predecessors for the better part of his career.

The meeting was held in the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef near Bonn, Germany. This is is a conference center of the German Physical Society (DPG), the largest physical society in the world.

The meeting was organized by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS).

This seminar was generously funded by the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation.