NASA’s PUNCH Mission Targeting Launch in Late February 2025

NASA and SpaceX are targeting late February 2025 for the launch of NASA’s PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

PUNCH is a constellation of four small satellites heading to low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to learn how the mass and energy there become the solar wind. The mission is led by the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and Boulder, Colorado, and is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

PUNCH is launching as a secondary payload with the agency’s next astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer).

Learn more: https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2024/12/09/nasa-eyes-launching-spherex-sky-mapping-mission-in-early-2025/