The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute plans to develop a coronagraph in collaboration with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and to install it on the International Space Station (ISS). The coronagraph is an externally occulted one-stage coronagraph with a field of view from 3 to 15 solar radii. The observation wavelength is approximately 400~nm, where strong Fraunhofer absorption lines from the photosphere experience thermal broadening and Doppler shift through scattering by coronal electrons. Photometric filter observations around this band enable the estimation of 2D electron temperature and electron velocity distribution in the corona. Together with a high time cadence ($<$12~min) of corona images used to determine the geometric and kinematic parameters of coronal mass ejections, the coronagraph will yield the spatial distribution of electron density by measuring the polarized brightness. For the purpose of technical demonstration, we intend to observe the total solar eclipse in August 2017 with the filter system and to perform a stratospheric balloon experiment in 2019 with the engineering model of the coronagraph. The coronagraph is planned to be installed on the ISS in 2021 for addressing a number of questions (e.g., coronal heating and solar wind acceleration) that are both fundamental and practically important in the physics of the solar corona and of the heliosphere.

We investigate two abnormal CME-Storm pairs that occurred on 2014 September 10 - 12 and 2015 March 15 - 17, respectively. The first one was a moderate geomagnetic storm (Dstmin  -75 nT) driven by the X1.6 high speed flare-associated CME (1267 km s−1) in AR 12158 (N14E02) near solar disk center. The other was a very intense geomagnetic storm (Dstmin  -223 nT) caused by a CME with moderate speed (719 km s−1) and associated with a filament eruption accompanied by a weak flare (C9.1) in AR 12297 (S17W38). Both CMEs have large direction parameters facing the Earth and southward magnetic field orientation in their solar source region. In this study, we inspect the structure of Interplanetary Flux Ropes (IFRs) at the Earth estimated by using the torus fitting technique assuming self-similar expansion. As results, we find that the moderate storm on 2014 September 12 was caused by small-scale southward magnetic fields in the sheath region ahead of the IFR. The Earth traversed the portion of the IFR where only the northward fields are observed. Meanwhile, in case of the 2015 March 17 storm, our IFR analysis revealed that the Earth passed the very portion where only the southward magnetic fields are observed throughout the passage. The resultant southward magnetic field with long- duration is the main cause of the intense storm. We suggest that 3D magnetic field geometry of an IFR at the IFR-Earth encounter is important and the strength of a geomagnetic storm is strongly affected by the relative location of the Earth with respect to the IFR structure.

Recently, we suggested a CME earthward direction parameter as an important geoeffective parameter that has been demonstrated by front-side halo CME data. In this study, we present the geometrical implication of this parameter by comparing with the parameters from a CME cone model. Major results from this study can be summarized as follows. First, we derive an analytic relationship between the cone model parameters (the half angular width of a cone and the angle between the cone axis and the plane of sky) and the earthward direction parameter. Second, we demonstrate a close relationship between the earthward direction parameter and the cone axis angle using 32 front-side full halo CMEs. Third, we found that there is noticeable inconsistency between the cone axis angles estimated from the cone model fitting to the CMEs and from their associated flare positions, implying that the flare position should not be considered as a good earthward direction parameter. Finally we present several advantages of our earthward direction parameter in terms of the forecast of a geomagnetic storm based on CME parameters.