PUNCH is an acronym.
It stands for Polarimeter
to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere.
The corona is the outer atmosphere of the Sun.
It's the part that is no longer gravitationally bound to the Sun,
and it has so much energy that it flows outwards, filling our solar system
and pushes against the interstellar medium making a bubble —
and that is the heliosphere.
And this system of how the corona turns
into the heliosphere is what PUNCH is trying to study.
So PUNCH is fundamentally four cameras that work together to make composite
movies.
We have a Narrow Field Imager that views the space close to the Sun,
and then we have three separate Wide Field Imagers,
each of which has a large, squarish field of view
that looks way off to the side up to 45 degrees away from the Sun.
That allows us to do something that no other mission has been able to do,
which is routinely track coronal mass ejections, space storms,
all the way across the solar system as they approach the Earth.
By better understanding these storms and better understanding
how they propagate on their way to the Earth,
we'll be able to inform our partners on how to better forecast
these events in the future.
And that's really important for protecting our astronauts,
our satellites, and our power grids.
Once we launch and start producing images you'll be able to look at PUNCH
data directly and see the kind of science we're engaged in.
You'll be able to see things that are present in the sky right now
and you just — you're not aware of them because they're washed out by the
the brightness of the sky itself.
We are poised to do tremendous science with PUNCH,
because it provides this global context of what is happening in the corona
and what is happening throughout the inner solar system,
so that we can connect the details to the bigger picture.
You might say that PUNCH is the next chapter in the study of heliophysics
as we bring imaging and cross-scale understanding out,
so that we can develop a coherent understanding of the entire system
that starts at the corona and extends out to envelop the planets themselves.