Guest report from Tim Horbury of Imperial, who  is also (quick plug) one of the guests on this month’s Sky at Night.

I’m sitting in a session called “Solar and Solar-Terrestrial Physics Mission Forum” – it’s full of talks about current and future spacecraft from around the world, as well as instruments on the ground. There are lots of PhD students and young post-docs here: spacecraft often take more than 10 years to plan and build so it’s these future missions that the young people will be using when they’re well established academics.Despite STFC’s current funding problems, there are a wide array of missions out there. We’ve heard about the fantastic results from the Japanese Hinode spacecraft which is taking stunning movies of the Sun’s surface, using a telescope built in the UK (there’s more about some Hinode results here. I talked about my favourite, Solar Orbiter, which will go closer to the Sun than we’ve ever been before, much closer than Mercury. It won’t launch until 2015 though: you’ve got to be patient in this business!