What can NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission teach scientists about solar wind and space weather? This is what findings presented at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting discussed as a team of researchers from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) discussed how PUNCH is successfully observing and analyzing space weather. This comes as PUNCH was launched on March 11, 2025, and is currently in low Earth orbit with the goal of better understanding a previously unexplored region of the Sun ranging from the solar corona to Earth orbit.
These first findings demonstrated PUNCH’s ability to successfully observe coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are some of the most powerful eruptions emanating from the Sun’s corona, which is the outermost region of the Sun’s atmosphere. The reason CMEs are of utmost importance to study is their influence on Earth, including geomagnetic storms that disturb the Earth’s magnetic field, auroras observed near the polar regions but can be observed in other parts of the world depending on the severity of the CME, and radiation hazards for astronauts in space and life on Earth.
“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 Dr. Craig DeForest, who is the PUNCH principal investigator from SwRI’s Space Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado and presented the findings at the meeting. “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.”
What new discoveries about space weather will PUNCH make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Southwest Research Institute, NASA
Featured Image: Solar activity imaged by PUNCH. (Credit: Southwest Research Institute)
