A Year of the Solar Corona, from PUNCH/NFI We just released a full year of PUNCH/NFI data, showing how the #corona evolved during the first 12 months of PUNCH #science operations! ☀️🔭🛰️🧪🚀 whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
PUNCH mission
@punch-mission.bsky.social
Four spacecraft, one instrument … imaging almost nothing at all. PUNCH is a polarizing wide-field imager, distributed across four orbiting spacecraft, to track space weather (and solar wind) across the heliosphere. (Non-NASA account for the mission team).
We watched a bright comet's tail break up in the ubiquitous solar wind, turning into vortices like the whirlpools left by an oar stroked through water. But 10x larger than Earth! ☀️🧪🛰️🔭🚀 whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
Visualizing the Artemis-Mission CMEs with PUNCH | PUNCH mission | WhiteWind blog How can you visualize/display a CME when you need to see both the lower corona and a huge 90° wide swath of the inner solar system? Nonlinear stretching! ☀️🧪🔭🛰️ whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
Girl Scouts earn the PUNCH Ancient & Modern Sunwatching Patch! We are working with the #girlscouts to teach kids about #heliophysics and the amazing world around us. A few will become scientists, and all will carry their knowledge into society. ☀️🧪🛰️🔭 whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
We're doing quantitative analysis now, tracking CME fronts across the solar system. A tried-and-true way to do that is by generating "height-time maps" (also called "J-maps") that show at a glance how each event moves. Here's a blog post describing how we do that. ☀️🧪🛰️🔭 whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
A Celestial Staring Contest (across 1 AU) PUNCH observes Parker Solar Probe continuously. But Parker Solar Probe also observes PUNCH from time to time! Click the WhiteWind blog link for a nice visual of this celestial "staring contest" between the two missions. ☀️🧪🔭🛰️ whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
PUNCH images are now making tomographic models of the solar wind – like a CAT scan of the entire inner solar system! ☀️🧪🔭🛰️ whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
The upper (or outer) limit of the solar corona is the "Alfvén surface. One of our objectives is to map the surface on the daily. Our big-sister mission Parker Solar Probe flies through that region. Some of our Co-I's have been modeling its evolution across years. 🧪☀️🔭🛰️ whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
Aww, thanks @craig.deforest.org. We're still going strong! Watch for some very cool comet results and new data products in the next few weeks!
Dr. Craig DeForest ☀️@craig.deforest.org · 7mo agoHappy birthday, @punch-mission.bsky.social! One year (minus two hours) ago as I post, this (pic) happened in California. 40 min later, the 4 PUNCH satellites deployed over Africa. Since then, we've downlinked ~1.5 million images of space – and changed the way humanity sees our environment. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭
Even spacecraft experience the astronomical seasons just like we do here on Earth! Here's a plot showing how the PUNCH spacecrafts' batteries saw increasing use during our roughly-75-day "eclipse season" near the winter solstice. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭 Full writeup here: whtwnd.com/punch-missio...
It's been six months since our "first light" release of science data, and also since the PUNCH Outreach Project observed the (June 3) "Double Diamond" at the iconic Chaco Canyon "curly zia" petroglyph (which appears to be among the oldest human renderings of the solar corona). ☀️🔭🛰️
Celebrating "First Light" for PUNCH and PUNCH Outreach | PUNCH mission
image June 3rd, 2025: Sunrise over Triangle Rock in Chaco Canyon AND the "first light" release image for PUNCH The PUNCH Outreach team has contributed to cultural astronomy research in Chaco Canyon, ...
whtwnd.com
Two great tastes that taste great together! ☀️🧪🔭
Two Eyes on the Sun: Unveiling Solar Dynamics with Coordinated Observations - NSO - National Solar Observatory
In October 2022, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and the European Space Agency (ESA) Solar Orbiter carried out their first coordinated campaign, capturing a...
nso.edu
Polarization Fireworks | PUNCH mission | WhiteWind blog PUNCH science nugget #24: some cool "fireworks" in our polarized images! #solarcorona ☀️🛰️🔭🧪
Polarization Fireworks | PUNCH mission
A colorful image of the solar corona, starfield, and dust shows colorful streaks from the polarized corona and moving dust motes near the PUNCH spacecraft A debris impact on WFI-2, together with the p...
whtwnd.com
PUNCH @punch-mission.bsky.social found out we are good at comet tracking, even as we calibrate/refine our solar wind imaging pipeline. In the last 3 months, we've tracked 3 notable comets with images every 4 min, around the clock: SWAN, Atlas, and Lemmon. PUNCH data are free to get and use. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭
NASA's PUNCH Tracks Comet Discovered by SOHO Spacecraft - NASA Science
From August to October, NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission tracked comet 2025 R2 (SWAN) — one of the thousands of comets
science.nasa.gov
We just rolled out v0h of the PUNCH data pipeline. Most of Aug and Sep are now up. By Sunday we should have reprocessed it all. The L2 data include 4-min-cadence images of 3I/Atlas for those who wish to verify it is not an alien spaceship doing maneuvers. 🧪🚀🛰️🔭☀️ punch.space.swri.edu/punch_scienc...
We continue to refine our data products. The servers are right now reprocessing images for our version 0h data, which will turn up in data repositories over the next few days. Here's a short nugget on how we're working toward routine 0.1% photometric precision. ☀️🧪🔭🛰️ (whtwnd.com/punch-missio...)
Learn by doing! Come manipulate PUNCH data at our online science meeting this Thursday! ☀️🛰️ Deets at the PUNCH website (punch.space.swri.edu).
New nugget from PUNCH today: sometimes, adding noise to data makes the data better. ☀️🧪🔭🛰️
The Importance of [photon] Noise | PUNCH mission
Plots showing the effect of noise on PUNCH data PUNCH models of background light in the instruments were developing “stairstepping” errors (blue trace at left); this is resolved by adding artificial n...
whtwnd.com
It's been a while, but not because we're idle! We've got lots going on "behind the scenes" at #PUNCH. Here's our latest -- this comet has only been known for a week, but we've been imaging it since mid August! 🧪🛰️🔭☀️
PUNCH Tracks A New Comet: C/2025 R2 (SWAN) | PUNCH mission
image \*PUNCH detected comet SWAN for weeks before its discovery last week (11-Sep-2025). Tracking the comet is a warmup for tracking the upcoming 3I interstellar comet, which will enter the PUNCH FO...
whtwnd.com
Looks like we'll be able to help forecast radiation storms in interplanetary space! #spaceweather 🛰️🧪☀️
Forecasting Energetic Particles in the Inner Heliosphere | PUNCH mission
image By tracking the Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) speed relative to the surrounding background, PUNCH can now forecast radiation levels from space weather events known as Energetic Storm Particle (ES...
whtwnd.com
Super proud of being part of this mission. Go Parker! www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1dT... #astronomy #heliophysics
The Closest Images Ever Taken of the Sun’s Atmosphere
YouTube video by NASA Goddard
youtube.com
It's an exciting time as we ramp up the data reduction pipeline. Here's the first of several items about the legwork we've done as the science team prepares to execute our science! 🧪☀️
The Sun's Alfvén Surface | PUNCH mission
The Alfvén surface – the outer boundary of the Sun's corona – is very complex. This visualization of the Sun's Alfvén surface, with regions below the surface shown using a total eclipse image from ast...
whtwnd.com
We're starting to view space weather events! 🛰️☀️https://whtwnd.com/punch-mission.bsky.social/3lrgewlzwae2l
NFI Sees a CME | PUNCH mission
The PUNCH/NFI coronagraph revealed beautiful, detailed structure in a CME departing the Sun on 6/3/2025. Preliminary images like this one demonstrate that the instrument is working well and the Scienc...
whtwnd.com
So cool...
Dr. Craig DeForest ☀️@craig.deforest.org · last yr.Hey! Lookie what PUNCH (@punch-mission.bsky.social) just saw! Two different solar storms crossing the entire inner solar system! NASA's site doesn't thumbnail well, so click the link for the movie and other images. ☀️🔭🛰️🧪 science.nasa.gov/blogs/punch/...
Every bit downlinked from space costs money. PUNCH saved a whole heck of a lot of that, by just not downlinking information about the photon noise field. ☀️🛰️🔭🧪🚀
Don't downlink quantum noise! | PUNCH mission
A plot of noise levels in PUNCH data shows the effect of photon-counting (quantum) noise PUNCH uses square-root coding to eliminate unwanted quantum “photon noise” from the data. Raw camera pixels are...
whtwnd.com
We're now publishing all our celestial images from space as they become available at the PUNCH SOC -- up to about 700 images per day per spacecraft! "Level 0" (straight-from-camera) at the moment; Level 1 (photometric) in just a couple of weeks. ☀️🛰️🔭🧪
PUNCH data are live online! | PUNCH mission
Screen snap of the PUNCH data access pagePUNCH data are now available via NASA's Solar Data Analysis Center, or via the PUNCH website at https://punch.space.swri.edu. PUNCH images of space are now av...
whtwnd.com
We made the cover of Technology Today, SwRI's quarterly news magazine! Here's a very approachable article describing what we're all about. ☀️🔭🛰️🧪
PUNCH Makes the Invisible Visible | Southwest Research Institute
swri.org
When does a new Moon look like a full Moon? When we see it by Earthlight against the backdrop of the solar corona! ☀️🛰️🔭🧪
NFI sees the new Moon | PUNCH mission
NFI Level 0 image, 2025-04-27 11:28:21 UTC During commissioning, the PUNCH NFI instrument captured this image on 4/27/2025: the new Moon, roughly 3.5° from the Sun itself in the sky. The Moon is illu...
whtwnd.com
WFI-1 caught the "smiley face" before it turned "smiley", in a rare quaduple conjunction of the Moon, Venus, Saturn ... and Neptune! Plus a side dish of Mercury. 🛰️🔭☀️🧪🚀
WFI-1 sees four planets and a crescent moon | PUNCH mission
WFI-1 Level-0 Image During commissioning, the PUNCH WFI-1 spacecraft captured this image of the quadruple conjunction of Moon, Venus, Saturn, and Neptune, with Mercury nearby. There've been lots of s...
whtwnd.com