NASA’s Punch mission to finally solve Sun’s biggest mystery

is launching a new mission that will use four suitcase-sized satellites weighing 64kg to study how the Sun’s atmosphere creates solar wind in more detail than ever before.

Solar wind and events such as coronal mass ejections can have weather effects that ripple through the solar system.

By imaging the Sun’s corona and the solar wind together, scientists hope to better understand the entire inner heliosphere – Sun, solar wind, and Earth – as a single connected system.

The PUNCH mission, which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, could help experts better understand how to forecast such events and how they will affect the Earth.

The mission’s principal investigator, Dr Craig Deforest of the Southwest Research Institute, said PUNCH fundamentally consisted of four cameras that will make composite images.

Each will be carried on a satellite in a polar, low Earth orbit. Their 3D observations will allow experts to learn how the mass and energy of the Sun’s corona become the solar wind.

Dr Deforest said: “That allows us to do something that no other mission has been able to do, which is routinely track coronal mass ejections – space storms – all the way across the solar system as they approach the Earth.”

Understanding these storms could allow scientists to better forecast such events, PUNCH mission scientist Dr Nicholeen Viall said.

Better predictions about the impact of space weather events on Earth, as well as on astronauts in space, are vital.

Dr Viall added added: “That’s really important for protecting our astronauts, our satellites and our power grids.”

PUNCH is the latest advance in the field of heliophysics, of the study of the Sun and its influence throughout the solar system.

The mission’s launch, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, is scheduled for no earlier than February 27.

Data captured by the satellites will be made available to the public at the same time as it reaches NASA scientists.