I think this is fairly neat, the sun and it's "weather" are starting to actually play a role in our everyday lives.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_flare_040715.html
Of particular interest to me;
Last October and November, the Sun generated an amazing series of 10 X-class flares in the space of two weeks. One was the most powerful on record, an X28. A few spacecraft were damaged or disabled, and a significant bit of Mars' atmosphere was stripped way.
They are saying that solar storms have helped strip away Mars' atmosphere. When the last flare pasted through mars, we had lots of equipment monitoring the situation (2 NASA rovers and the ESA's Mars Express Orbiter, Cassandra heading to Saturn) and found that it took with it air in the Martian atmosphere.
Mars has no globally protective magnetic field like Earth, so the storm interacted much differently there than it does here. "Substantial parts of the upper atmosphere [of Mars] escaped into space," said Thomas Zurbuchen of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
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