Author: Abbey Interrante

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. 

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/

Editor’s Note: As of October 2024, the current launch timeline for the PUNCH mission is no later than April 2025. For the latest information about PUNCH’s launch, please visit science.nasa.gov/mission/punch.

NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will share a ride to space with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission. The missions will launch no earlier than April 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9.

“It’s great to have a definite launch date and vehicle, and we’re looking forward to working with the SPHEREx team as we `carpool’ to orbit,” said Craig DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Rideshares are a great way to save money by taking better advantage of each rocket’s capability.”

The contract with SpaceX was updated to include PUNCH and was awarded July 14, 2022. The PUNCH team was able to adjust its schedule to meet the new launch date of no earlier than April 2025 and used this new schedule flexibility to mitigate some schedule constraints due to supply chain challenges.

PUNCH, which consists of four suitcase-sized satellites, will focus on the Sun’s outer atmosphere (the corona) and how it generates the solar wind. The spacecraft also will track coronal mass ejections – large eruptions of solar material that can drive large space weather events near Earth – to better understand their evolution and develop new techniques for predicting such eruptions.

The four satellites will spread out around Earth along the day-night line, which enables it to create a continuous, complete, view of the corona and inner solar system. Three of the PUNCH satellites will carry identical Wide Field Imagers, which, together, image the corona and solar wind over a 90-degree field of view (out to 45 degrees away from the Sun). In skywatching terms, 90 degrees covers the part of the sky from the horizon to the point directly overhead. The fourth PUNCH satellite carries a Narrow Field Imager coronagraph, which will study regions closest to the Sun. All four cameras will be synchronized in flight, so that the mission science team can combine their images seamlessly into a single large field of view.

PUNCH is led by Southwest Research Institute’s office in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which is managed by Goddard for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Southwest Research Institute will build the Wide Field Imagers and will build and operate PUNCH. The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will build the Narrow Field Imagers and provide optical testing. RAL Space in the United Kingdom will provide detectors and calibration for the mission.