NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission has released processed images of huge eruptions from the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that occurred from Oct. 21 to Nov. 12. This release marks the first time PUNCH observations can be used to continuously trace solar eruptions from the Sun’s outer atmosphere into interplanetary space.
This video shows several coronal mass ejections (CMEs)
erupting from the Sun’s surface from Oct. 21 to Nov. 12, 2025. The CMEs can be
seen as cloud-like features moving away from the Sun (at center) in all
directions. The comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) can be seen at the top, Venus at the
left, and Mercury to the right of center. The video is made from a mosaic of
images taken from imagers hosted on PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and
Heliosphere)’s four spacecraft. One spacecraft hosts the Narrow Field Imager,
which contains a coronagraph that blocks out the Sun in the center, revealing
the faint, wispy details of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The other
three spacecraft host Wide Field Imagers that provide broad views of the Sun.
The images, which are taken several times a day over several days, are then
combined into a mosaic to allow scientists to observe solar events that aid in
space weather tracking, prediction, and research.
NASA/SwRI
To study the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or
corona, each of the PUNCH
mission spacecraft are outfitted with a
camera that works with the others as a single “virtual instrument.” One PUNCH
spacecraft hosts a Narrow Field Imager, which is a coronagraph designed to
block out the bright radius of light from the Sun’s disk to reveal the faint,
wispy details of the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere. The other three PUNCH
spacecraft each carry a Wide Field Imager that captures images of the
outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind. 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.
In the video, PUNCH captured several
CMEs erupting from the Sun’s surface over several weeks. These ejections led to
intense geomagnetic storms on Earth, with one particular storm in mid-November
rated as G4, or severe. According to NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration) Space Weather Prediction Center, the G4 rank is the second highest level, indicating elevated risks of
serious disturbances to Earth’s magnetic field and increased radiation exposure.
Such geomagnetic storms can have a significant impact on human society and
technology, from sparking and intensifying auroras to interfering with
satellites or triggering power outages. The storm on Nov. 11 resulted in
widespread auroras seen as far south as Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida
in the United States.
Though designed to observe CMEs, the PUNCH spacecraft tracks other objects
journeying through our inner solar system. For example, the imagery also
captured comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6), top portion of the video, making an
appearance when the comet was passing close to Earth.
Delivering
extra PUNCH with refined images
The PUNCH mission’s four suitcase-sized spacecraft are spread out along Earth’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 corona turns into a constant outflow of material that travels across the solar system, called the solar wind.
A conceptual animation shows the PUNCH spacecraft.
Working together, the four suitcase-sized satellites will create a combined
field of view and map the region where the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere,
transitions to the solar wind (the constant outflow of material from the Sun).
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image
Lab
The solar wind and energetic solar
events like flares and CMEs can create space weather effects throughout the
solar system. The measurements from PUNCH will provide scientists with new
information about how these potentially disruptive events form and evolve. This
could lead to more accurate predictions about the arrival of space weather
events on Earth and related impacts on humanity’s robotic and human explorers
in space.
To bring out details in the faint corona
and solar wind, PUNCH images require multiple steps or “levels” of processing,
from 0 (least processed) to 3 (fully processed). The PUNCH team is now
releasing Level 3 data but continues to work on perfecting the imagery.
“The current data release is still
preliminary, as we continue to refine the ground calibration to the exquisite
level we need to reach our final sensitivity,” said Craig DeForest, PUNCH’s
principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,
Colorado. “This release is a milestone because, although we still have work to
do, these are the first data products that can be used directly to track CMEs
and other events through the outer solar corona and inner heliosphere.”
With each iteration and release, the
team is reprocessing prior images downlinked from the mission, so the quality
of the PUNCH data products will continuously improve.
The 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. Scientists also use PUNCH’s
observations of the corona and heliosphere in a project known as QuickPUNCH to support space weather forecasting operations.
The PUNCH mission complements
observations from other NASA heliophysics missions — such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, STEREO, CODEX, and the recently launched IMAP, along with the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) Solar Orbiter and SOHO missions — 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.
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’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in
Washington.
By Desiree
Apodaca
NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Source: NASA’S PUNCH Releases Refined Images of Eruptions from Sun
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