The Southwest Research Institute-led Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission has collected its first images following its March 11 launch into polar orbit around Earth. The mission, consisting of four small spacecraft that will work together as a single virtual instrument, aims to image the solar corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere.
According to Principal Investigator Dr. Craig DeForest, the team opened the doors on the Near Field Imager (NFI) and Wide Field Imager (WFI) instruments in April. The WFI-2 spacecraft has already demonstrated its first three charge-and-fire cycles, modifying its orbital velocity relative to other PUNCH satellites.
The mission’s constellation includes a satellite with an NFI coronagraph that images the sun’s corona continuously, as well as three WFIs designed to view the solar wind and coronal mass ejections. The spacecraft are currently in a 90-day commissioning period, operating from SwRI’s Mission Operations Center.
During this phase, the PUNCH team is calibrating the data to remove noise and preserve the faint signal of the solar wind. They also tested novel water-powered rocket engines that will be used to stabilize the constellation.
The mission aims to improve our understanding of coronal mass ejections by collecting raw images with a space-rated camera developed by RAL Space. This new perspective will allow scientists to track the trajectory and speed of these events in three dimensions, providing valuable insights into the solar system.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2025-04-mission-instruments-images.html