NASA's PUNCH Mission

Released Tuesday, February 4, 2025

ID: 14773

NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH mission, is a constellation of four small satellites in low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to better understand how the mass and energy there becomes the solar wind that fills the solar system.

Watch the video to learn how imaging the Sun’s corona and the solar wind together will help scientists better understand the entire inner heliosphere — Sun, solar wind, and Earth — as a single connected system.

The PUNCH mission is led by Southwest Research Institute’s office in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

For more information visit science.nasa.gov/mission/punch

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

Music Credit: “Crafted with Science Instrumental” by Zak McNeil [ASCAP] via Universal Production Music

Video Credit: NASA/Beth Anthony

All four PUNCH fields of view combine to create a rotating trefoil shape as the four spacecraft orbit Earth. The field of view is 90 degrees across. This simulated image sequence, used to test the ground processing software, shows a simulated CME crossing a digital solar system at 500x real time. The SOC team used computer simulations of space weather events to create artificial PUNCH data and demonstrate that the analysis software will work properly, removing stars and other bright objects from the images to reveal the solar wind and space weather.

Credit: NASA/Southwest Research Institute