Coronal Heating and Solar Wind Acceleration: Future Work on Observations

The space-based observatories SOHO and TRACE have shown some very interesting results on the structure and dynamics of the Sun and its atmosphere, e.g., the extremely high ion temperatures or the enormous variability in the corona. But one question is still open to debate: how to use these data to distinguish between different types of physical heating processes, as, e.g., absorption of high-frequency Alfvén-waves or reconnection events? This paper will discuss some possibilities on how to tackle this type of question. These include observations of ion temperature anisotropies and electron temperatures in the corona as well as measurements of coronal magnetic fields. Emphasis will be put on simultaneous observations of the whole solar atmosphere from the photosphere into the solar wind and on solar-stellar connections. In the light of these ideas new proposed space missions as well as ground based efforts will be discussed.