PUNCH Mission Media Teleconference

NASA held a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EST on Tuesday, February 4, to share information about the agency’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, which is targeted to launch no earlier than Thursday, February 27, 2025.

The agency’s PUNCH mission is a constellation of four small satellites. When they arrive in low Earth orbit, the satellites will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and help NASA learn how the mass and energy there become solar wind. By imaging the Sun’s corona and the solar wind together, scientists hope to better understand the entire inner heliosphere – Sun, solar wind, and Earth – as a single connected system.

The PUNCH mission will share a ride to space with NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) space telescope on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, leads the PUNCH mission. 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 in Washington.

To learn more about PUNCH, please visit: nasa.gov/punch

See https://science.nasa.gov/mission/punch/