The Living with a Star (LWS) Sentinels Mission

NASA has recently formed a Science and Technology Definition Team (STDT) to define the Sentinels mission, the heliospheric element of the integrated LWS program. The objective of the Sentinels is to discover, understand and model the connection between solar events such as flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and heliospheric and magnetospheric events, such as Solar Particle Events (SPEs), that can adversely impact life and society. Moreover, Sentinels is also relevant for the new NASA exploration initiative to the Moon and beyond. The primary objective of Sentinels is to provide the observations necessary for an understanding of the physics of the Sun/inner heliosphere processes that affect the solar system, so the requirements for eventual predictive capability can be defined. I will describe the preliminary scientific planning to implement the Sentinels mission.