Mission controllers for NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) have received full acquisition of signal from the four small satellites, indicating that they are functioning normally and at full power.
Over a two-year planned mission, PUNCH will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, and how it becomes the solar wind.
The solar wind and energetic solar events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections can create space weather effects throughout the solar system. These phenomena can have a significant impact on human society and technology, from sparking and intensifying auroras to interfering with satellites or triggering power outages.
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 and crucial predictions about the arrival of space weather events at Earth and their impact on humanity’s robotic explorers in space.
All four spacecraft are synchronized to serve as a single “virtual instrument” that spans the whole PUNCH constellation. The PUNCH mission will downlink data multiple times a day via ground-based antennas on Earth that are managed by the Swedish Space Corporation. Then, the data will be sent to the mission operations center at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) offices in Boulder, Colorado, which will share it with the science operations center, also at SwRI.
The data will be available to the public at the same time it is available to the science team. All PUNCH data will be published through the Solar Data Analysis Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, ensuring open access to the scientific community and public.
Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, Texas, leads the PUNCH mission and will operate the four spacecraft from its facilities in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA Goddard for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
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For more information about the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/spherex/
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/punch/
This concludes NASA’s live launch coverage.