Launched into Earth orbit on March 11, PUNCH's four suitcase-sized spacecraft are now spread out along the planet's day-night boundary, giving the mission a continuous, unobstructed view of the Sun and its surroundings. This allows the mission to study how the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, turns into a constant outflow of material that travels across the solar system, called the solar wind.
"We want to measure the solar wind globally around the star in near real time," said PUNCH's principal investigator, Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "The planet gets in the way from the point of view of any one spacecraft, so we had to spread them around the planet to look everywhere all at once."
One of PUNCH's spacecraft hosts a Narrow Field Imager, while the other three each carry a Wide Field Imager. The Narrow Field Imager is a coronagraph, which blocks out the bright light from the Sun to better reveal details in the Sun's corona. The Wide Field Imagers capture images of the outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind in the inner solar system. The mission then combines these individual views into a wide-field mosaic that allows PUNCH to track space weather events from the Sun all the way to Earth.
This sprawling perspective from PUNCH complements observations from other heliophysics missions - such as NASA's Parker Solar Probe, STEREO, SOHO, and CODEX along with the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) Solar Orbiter mission - that examine the corona and solar wind at smaller scales and from different perspectives. Together, these missions provide a more complete picture of the corona and solar wind than we've ever had before.
"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," said Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In addition, PUNCH's early combined views are now available publicly as "Level 2" science data. To bring out details in the faint corona and solar wind, the PUNCH images require multiple steps or "levels" of processing, from 0 (least processed) to 3 (fully processed). Level 2 data are nearly fully processed, and they stitch together images from the different spacecraft into a mosaic, as if they were taken by a single science instrument at the same time.
The processed PUNCH images are available for download from NASA's Solar Data Analysis Center, and more information about the data is available at the Southwest Research Institute's data access page.
Related Links
PUNCH at Solar Data Analysis Center
Solar Science News at SpaceDaily
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