All four spacecraft of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission have successfully maneuvered into their final science orbits as of Aug 7.
Launched into Earth orbit on March 11,
PUNCH’s four suitcase-sized spacecraft are now spread out along the planet’s
day-night boundary, giving the mission a continuous, unobstructed view of
the Sun and its surroundings. This allows the mission to study how the Sun’s
outer atmosphere, or corona, turns into a constant outflow of material that
travels across the solar system, called the solar wind.
“We want to measure the solar wind
globally around the star in near real time,” said PUNCH’s principal
investigator, Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,
Colorado. “The planet gets in the way from the point of view of any one spacecraft,
so we had to spread them around the planet to look everywhere all at once.”
This visualization shows the four PUNCH spacecraft in
their science orbits. Spread around Earth along Earth’s day-night line, the
four spacecraft provide a continuous view of the Sun and its surroundings
that’s unobstructed by our planet.
NASA’s Conceptual Image Lab
One of PUNCH’s spacecraft hosts a Narrow
Field Imager, while the other three each carry a Wide Field Imager.
The Narrow Field Imager is a coronagraph, which blocks out the bright light
from the Sun to better reveal details in the Sun’s corona. The Wide Field
Imagers capture images of the outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar
wind in the inner solar system. The mission then combines these individual
views into a wide-field mosaic that allows PUNCH to track space weather events
from the Sun all the way to Earth.
This sprawling
perspective from PUNCH complements observations from other heliophysics
missions — such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, STEREO, SOHO, and CODEX along with the NASA/ESA (European
Space Agency) Solar Orbiter mission — that examine the corona and solar wind at
smaller scales and from different perspectives. Together, these missions
provide a more complete picture of the corona and solar wind than we’ve ever
had before.
“The PUNCH mission provides the global
picture that we can combine with all those other missions to really understand
this full, connected system between the Sun and the Earth,” said Nicholeen
Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland.
In addition,
PUNCH’s early combined views are now available publicly as
“Level 2” science data. To bring out details in the faint corona and solar
wind, the PUNCH images require multiple steps or “levels” of processing, from 0
(least processed) to 3 (fully processed). Level 2 data are nearly fully
processed, and they stitch together images from the different spacecraft into a
mosaic, as if they were taken by a single science instrument at the same
time.
This mosaic of images taken by PUNCH’s three Wide
Field Imagers on July 20, 2025, is an example of Level 2 data from the mission,
which is now publicly available for download. The Sun is blocked out near the
center, but some of its light spills over into the images. The mosaic captures
a wide view of the sky (extending up to 45 degrees from the Sun), including
planets and background stars. The brightness of Mercury and Venus cause
vertical streaks on the right — artifacts that will be removed in fully processed
data.
Southwest Research Institute
The processed PUNCH images are
available for download from NASA’s Solar Data Analysis Center, and more information about the data is available at the Southwest
Research Institute’s data
access page.
Southwest Research Institute, based in
San Antonio, leads the PUNCH mission and operates the four spacecraft from its
facilities in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by Space Science
Mission Operations at NASA Goddard for the Science Mission Directorate at the
agency’s headquarters in Washington.
By Vanessa Thomas
NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Source: NASA’s PUNCH Mission Reaches Science Orbit, Releases Data - NASA Science
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