SAN ANTONIO — June 10, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Craig DeForest discussed the latest accomplishments of NASA's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission during a media event at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. As the spacecraft constellation completes commissioning, early PUNCH data showed coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, as they erupted from the Sun and traveled across the inner solar system.
"These preliminary movies show that PUNCH can actually track space weather across the solar system and view the corona and solar wind as a single system," said DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator from SwRI's Space Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado. "This big-picture view is essential to helping scientists better understand and predict space weather driven by CMEs, which can disrupt communications, endanger satellites and create auroras at Earth."
PUNCH's four small suitcase-sized spacecraft act as a single virtual instrument 8,000 miles across to image the solar corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere, as it transitions into the solar wind that fills and defines our solar system.
"These first integrated images of our home in space are astonishing, but the best is yet to come," DeForest said. "Once the spacecraft are in their final formation and the ground processing is fully sighted over the next few months, we'll be able to track the solar wind and space weather in 3D throughout our neighborhood in space."
The SwRI-developed and -led Wide Field Imagers aboard three of the four PUNCH spacecraft collected high-resolution images of entire CMEs in greater detail than previously possible. These instruments are designed to observe the faint, outermost portion of the Sun's atmosphere and solar wind.
Images of a June CME from PUNCH's coronagraph, the Narrow Field Imager, aboard the fourth spacecraft allow scientists to see the details of the Sun's atmosphere by blocking the Sun's bright face.
On March 11, PUNCH launched into polar orbit to make global, 3D observations of the Sun's outer atmosphere and the inner solar system to help understand how material released from the Sun becomes the solar wind. The mission will also provide scientists with new data about how potentially disruptive events from the Sun, like solar flares and CMEs, form and evolve. This information could lead to more accurate predictions about the arrival of space weather at Earth and how it impacts assets and explorers in space.
Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, Texas, leads the PUNCH mission and operates the four spacecraft from its facilities in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
