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PUNCH is an acronym.

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It stands for Polarimeter

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to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere.

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The corona is the outer
atmosphere of the Sun.

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It's the part that is no longer
gravitationally bound to the Sun,

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and it has so much energy that it flows
outwards, filling our solar system

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and pushes against the interstellar
medium making a bubble —

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and that is the heliosphere.

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And this system of how the corona turns

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into the heliosphere is
what PUNCH is trying to study.

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So PUNCH is fundamentally four cameras
that work together to make composite

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movies.

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We have a Narrow Field Imager
that views the space close to the Sun,

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and then we have three separate
Wide Field Imagers,

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each of which has a large, 
squarish field of view

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that looks way off to the side
up to 45 degrees away from the Sun.

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That allows us to do something
that no other mission has been able to do,

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which is routinely track
coronal mass ejections, space storms,

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all the way across the solar system
as they approach the Earth.

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By better understanding these storms
and better understanding

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how they propagate
on their way to the Earth,

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we'll be able to inform our partners
on how to better forecast

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these events in the future.

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And that's really important
for protecting our astronauts,

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our satellites, and our power grids.

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Once we launch and start producing images
you'll be able to look at PUNCH

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data directly and see
the kind of science we're engaged in.

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You'll be able to see things
that are present in the sky right now

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and you just — you're not aware of them
because they're washed out by the

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the brightness of the sky itself.

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We are poised to do
tremendous science with PUNCH,

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because it provides this global context
of what is happening in the corona

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and what is happening
throughout the inner solar system,

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so that we can connect the details
to the bigger picture.

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You might say that PUNCH is the next
chapter in the study of heliophysics

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as we bring imaging and cross-scale
understanding out,

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so that we can develop a coherent
understanding of the entire system

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that starts at the corona and extends out
to envelop the planets themselves.