PUNCH

  • Released Friday, June 13, 2025
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NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission, launched in March 2025, is a constellation of four small satellites in low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the entire inner heliosphere to learn how the Sun's corona becomes the solar wind. Working together, the four PUNCH satellites will create a combined field of view and map the region where the Sun’s corona transitions to the solar wind.

The solar wind and energetic solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections can create space weather effects which can have a significant impact on human society and technology, from sparking and intensifying auroras to interfering with satellites or triggering power outages. The measurements from PUNCH will provide scientists with new information about how these potentially disruptive events form and evolve. This could lead to more accurate predictions about the arrival of space weather events at Earth and impact on humanity’s robotic explorers in space.

These first light images of large solar eruptions called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, were presented Tuesday June 10, 2025 at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

The images and videos were prepared for use on the NASA Hyperwall from content originally published at science.nasa.gov

PUNCH’s three Wide Field Imager cameras

From late May to early June 2025, PUNCH’s three Wide Field Imagers captured views of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, traveling out from the Sun into the solar system. The CMEs can be seen moving in all directions, including directly at the camera. The constellation Orion is visible at the bottom left, Venus can be seen at the far right, and Jupiter to the left of center. The bright object that leaves the frame on the left at the beginning of the video is the Moon. The small yellow dot at the center denotes the Sun, and the dashed white line around it represents the field of view of LASCO C3, an earlier coronagraph still used to forecast space weather aboard NASA-ESA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory).
NASA/SwRI

The Narrow Field Imager (NFI) camera

The Narrow Field Imager (NFI) camera, mounted on one of the four spacecraft of NASA’s PUNCH mission, imaged a large coronal mass ejection (CME) in exquisite detail on June 3, 2025. The CME can be seen rising in the center of the image, above the blocked-out Sun.

The Narrow Field Imager (NFI) camera, mounted on one of the four spacecraft of NASA’s PUNCH mission, imaged a large coronal mass ejection (CME) in exquisite detail on June 3, 2025. The CME can be seen rising in the center of the image, above the blocked-out Sun. This preliminary image includes artifacts of early processing but reveals NFI’s ability to image the Sun’s outer corona in great detail, in conjunction with the rest of PUNCH.
NASA/SwRI

Credits

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.

NASA/SwRI

Missions

This page is related to the following missions:

This page was originally published on Friday, June 13, 2025.
This page was last updated on Friday, June 27, 2025 at 11:12 AM EDT.