Launching in February 2025, NASA’s PUNCH mission will study the Sun’s corona and solar wind with four satellites.
NASA and SpaceX plan to launch NASA’s PUNCH mission (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) in late February 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The PUNCH mission consists of four small satellites designed to enter low Earth orbit and capture 3D, global views of the Sun’s corona. By studying how mass and energy in the corona become the solar wind, scientists hope to gain new insights into solar activity and its effects on space weather.
The mission is led by the Southwest Research Institute, with teams based in San Antonio, Texas, and Boulder, Colorado. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the mission.
PUNCH is launching as a secondary payload with NASA’s next astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer).
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