During the past decade the world solar physics community has made significant progress in understanding the Sun and its interaction with the heliosphere and Earth's magnetosphere. NASA in coordination and cooperation with many other countries has had impressive results with the SOHO, YOHKOH, POLAR, GEOTAIL, etc spacecraft. These successes have given us a sound foundation to proceed into the new century. The two current main efforts in the U.S. are the Solar Terrestrial Probes (STP) and Living With A Star (LWS) programs. The STP program is basically science driven with new missions being selected on the basis of basic science discovery. The LWS program is focused on understanding the basic physics of solar variability and its effects on Earth systems. The current plans for these two programs are discussed.

To understand the basic physics underlying large spatial fluctuations of intensity and Doppler shift, we have investigated the dynamical charctersitics of the transition region of the quiet sun by analyzing a raster scan of high resolution UV spectral band containing H Lyman lines and a S VI line. The spectra were taken from a quiet area of 100"×100" located near the disk center by SUMER on board SOHO. The spectral band ranges from 906 Å to 950 Å with spatial and spectral resolution of 1" and 0.044 Å, respectively. The parameters of individual spectral lines were determined from a single Gaussian fit to each spectral line. Then, spatial correlation analyses have been made among the line parameters. Important findings emerged from the present analysis are as follows. (1) The integrated intensity maps of the observed area of H I 931 line (1×10 4 K) and S VI 933 line (2×10 5 K) look very smilar to each other with the same characterstic size of 5". An important difference, however, is that the intensity ratio of brighter network regions to darker cell regions is much larger in S VI 933 line than that in H I 931 line. (2) Dynamical features represented by Doppler shifts and line widths are smaller than those features seen in intensity maps. The features are found to be changing rapidly with time within a time scale shorter than the integration time, 110 seconds, while the intensity structure remains nearly unchanged during the same time interval. (3) The line intensity of S VI is quite strongly correlated with that of H I lines, but the Doppler shift correlation between the two lines is not as strong as the intensity correlation. The correlation length of the intensity structure is found to be about 5.7' (4100 km), which is at least 3 times larger than that of the velocity structure. These findings support the notion that the basic unit of the transition region of the quiet sun is a loop-like structure with a size of a few 10 3 km, within which a number of unresolved smaller velocity structures are present.