Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere
NASA satellite constellation for solar corona research
Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), also known as SMEX-15, is a mission by NASA to study the unexplored region from the middle of the solar corona out to 1 AU from the Sun. The PUNCH flight assets are a constellation of four microsatellites that through continuous 3D deep-field imaging, will observe the corona and heliosphere as elements of a single, connected system. The four microsatellites were initially scheduled to be launched in October 2023, but were moved to launch alongside (rideshare) the SPHEREx space observatory on a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, from which all five satellites were successfully deployed on 11 March 2025.
On 20 June 2019, NASA announced that PUNCH and TRACERS were the winning candidates to become the next missions in the agency's Small Explorer program (SMEX).
PUNCH is led by Craig DeForest at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. Including launch costs, PUNCH is being funded for no more than US$165 million.
On 14 April 2025, PUNCH captured its first image with the Narrow Field Imager (NFI) and one of its three Wide Field Imagers (WFI). Two days later, the remaining two WFIs captured their first image.
Mission
The stated primary objective of PUNCH is "to fully discern the cross-scale physical processes, from microscale turbulence to the evolution of global-scale structures, that unify the solar corona and heliosphere". In other words, the mission aims to understand how the solar corona becomes the solar wind.
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This entry incorporates text from “Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.