The fast stuff is actually the less variable, arising from regions in the sun's corona (the cloud of hot, ionised gas that surrounds the sun proper and which is most apparent during an eclipse).
And NASA's recently launched Genesis probe is designed to collect pieces of the solar wind to find out exactly what particles it is made from.Japan's space agency, meanwhile, is planning to fly a mission called Solar-B in 2005, to observe how magnetic fields on the sun's surface interact with the corona and thus, with luck, solve the mystery of the corona's enormous temperature.
It was Mrs Arroyo who appointed Mr Corona.
The result looked like corona discharges, known to mariners as St Elmo's fire ominous flickering lights sometimes seen above the masts of a ship about to be hit by lightning.Dr Kasparian thinks that more powerful lasers will be able to draw lightning to the ground.
The denser, more turbulent slow wind, by contrast has a composition more like that of the corona, and its origin has remained a subject of some debate.Scientists now seem to be closing in on an answer.
At holes in the corona near the poles, magnetic field lines do not quite complete loops, permitting the charged particles to escape a mix of elements from what is called the photosphere (nearer the surface of the sun itself in a very real sense, it's where the sun does shine).
At each solar maximum, the corona sloughs off the magnetic fingerprint of the previous cycle by pushing it to the poles.
If the present trend continues, that will happen in 2021.The third measure of the sun's decline is in its outer atmosphere, the corona.
Despite coming within 140,000km (87,000 miles) of the solar surface, well inside the corona, a cloud of million-degree plasma that envelops the sun, it survived.
A reconnaissance UAV known as Red Wagon did not fare well, and funding went instead into a fast, high-altitude plane that later became known as the SR-71 Blackbird, and the first Corona surveillance satellites.But America's air force continued to experiment, converting a small jet-powered target drone, the Firebee, into an unmanned spy plane called the Lightning Bug.
This relies on pictures of the sun's tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, taken through a green filter that emphasises the glowing, ionised iron that resides there.While poring over such pictures, Dr Altrock noticed a pattern that had previously been overlooked: a few years before a solar maximum, a pair of bright spots emerges at solar latitudes 55 north and south.
