NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission has successfully reached its final science orbits for all four of its spacecraft as of August 7, 2025. This strategic positioning along Earth's day-night boundary provides an uninterrupted, comprehensive view of the Sun and its surrounding environment. Launched on March 11, 2025, PUNCH is designed to study the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, and its transformation into the solar wind.
The PUNCH mission utilizes four compact, suitcase-sized satellites. One spacecraft is equipped with a Narrow Field Imager (NFI), functioning as a coronagraph to reveal the intricate details of the corona by obscuring the Sun's direct light. The other three satellites carry Wide Field Imagers (WFIs) to capture expansive views of the outer corona and solar wind. By combining these perspectives, PUNCH aims to track space weather events from their origin at the Sun to Earth. Preliminary images released from the mission showcase its capabilities, including an image of the Sun with the Moon on April 27, 2025, and views of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) captured by the WFIs from late May to early June 2025. These early observations were presented at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, offering new insights into CME dynamics and space weather phenomena.
PUNCH operates in synergy with other heliophysics missions, including NASA's Parker Solar Probe, STEREO, SOHO, and the NASA/ESA Solar Orbiter. Nicholeen Viall, a PUNCH mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, highlighted this collaborative approach, stating, "The PUNCH mission provides the global picture that we can combine with all those other missions to really understand this full, connected system between the Sun and the Earth." This integrated perspective is crucial for refining space weather predictions, which are vital for safeguarding Earth's critical infrastructures. Craig DeForest, the principal investigator for PUNCH at the Southwest Research Institute, emphasized the mission's objective to measure the solar wind globally in near real-time, a feat made possible by the strategic positioning of the four spacecraft. Processed images from PUNCH's early observations are accessible through NASA's Solar Data Analysis Center and the Southwest Research Institute's data access page.