PUNCH mission

A plot of spacecraft battery charge level over 2.5 months, for each of the four PUNCH spacecraft, reveals battery usage while the spacecraft flew through Earth's shadow in late 2025. (https://whtwnd.com/did:plc:dd6rbxnc4ostg26plpmonhcz/3mewyevrmrg2v)

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...

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, ...

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). ☀️🔭🛰️

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...

Two great tastes that taste great together! ☀️🧪🔭

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...

Polarization Fireworks | PUNCH mission | WhiteWind blog

PUNCH science nugget #24: some cool "fireworks" in our polarized images! #solarcorona ☀️🛰️🔭🧪

This is terrific! If you'd like to share your processes with us and/or others, we'd love to hear more. You can email us via the "about" menu here: punch.space.swri.edu.

v0i data are imminent and they are even better than v0h. We are also publishing our standard movie script in the PUNCH github.

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

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. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭

https://punch.space.swri.edu/punch_science_getdata.php

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...

WhiteWind blog banner: "The Journey to 0.1% Photometric Calibration". Link: https://whtwnd.com/punch-mission.bsky.social/3m4eeeelx5h2v

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...)

Screen snap of the PUNCH website news carousel shows a pumpkin carved into the shape of the PUNCH field of view, with eyeholes and a jagged mouth to make a spooky face! It is advertising an online science meeting on October 30.

Learn by doing! Come manipulate PUNCH data at our online science meeting this Thursday! ☀️🛰️ Deets at the PUNCH website (punch.space.swri.edu).

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...

New nugget from PUNCH today: sometimes, adding noise to data makes the data better. ☀️🧪🔭🛰️

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...

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! 🧪🛰️🔭☀️

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...

Looks like we'll be able to help forecast radiation storms in interplanetary space! #spaceweather 🛰️🧪☀️

The Closest Images Ever Taken of the Sun’s Atmosphere YouTube video by NASA Goddard

Super proud of being part of this mission. Go Parker!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1dT...
#astronomy #heliophysics

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...

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! 🧪☀️

Not to mention the truly amazing imagery from DKIST -- both off-limb and on-disk. Their coronal rain sequence is stunning, but the granulation at 20km resolution is incredibly spectacular and reveals a lot of physics that has been hiding under the resolution limit of more typical observations.

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...

We're starting to view space weather events! 🛰️☀️https://whtwnd.com/punch-mission.bsky.social/3lrgewlzwae2l

So cool...

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...

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. ☀️🛰️🔭🧪🚀

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...

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. ☀️🛰️🔭🧪

#heliophysics

PUNCH Makes the Invisible Visible | Southwest Research Institute

We made the cover of Technology Today, SwRI's quarterly news magazine! Here's a very approachable article describing what we're all about. ☀️🔭🛰️🧪

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...

When does a new Moon look like a full Moon? When we see it by Earthlight against the backdrop of the solar corona! ☀️🛰️🔭🧪

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...

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. 🛰️🔭☀️🧪🚀

A Polarimetric Rainbow | PUNCH mission A polarimetric image set collected by PUNCH/WFI-2 on 18-April-2025 shows the zodiacal light as an ethereal rainbow in front of the familiar constellations of Taurus (including the Pleiades) and Triang...

Solar and heliospheric data, like astronomical #photography, often carry ethereal beauty. Here is the zodiacal light (the dust cloud around our star), with linear #polarization rendered as color, in front of the unpolarized stars of #constellation #taurus and the #pleiades. Lots more to come. ☀️🔭🧪🛰️

Why PUNCH commissioning takes months (it's planned) | PUNCH mission As we continue commissioning the PUNCH Observatories, we're knocking off action items day by day and also bringing in the first scientific data sets. During this time we're all impatient to see the a...

Here's a short article on why it's necessary to wait for good things – especially the polarimetric data products we'll be exporting after we finish commissioning (and in-flight calibration). ☀️🛰️🔭

A Mission to Take Sick Images of the Sun Got Its First Test Shots Back The first images from a nascent NASA mission showcased the spacecraft's ability to take deep-field images of the night sky.

Yep, that's us. 🛰️🔭

PUNCH Collects Spectacular First Light | PUNCH mission first-light montage from PUNCH This first-light mosaic from PUNCH shows how the NFI and WFI fields of view fit together. Celestial objects are visible down to 9th magnitude (asteroid Iris) in the raw...

We released our first light images! Here's a nugget entry about it, with links to the official mission blog and two press releases. ☀️🧪🔭🛰️🚀

(In case it is not clear, this is not an official NASA channel; it is operated by the PUNCH mission team. You can find official NASA announcements at the agency PUNCH blog, at nasa.gov/punch.)

PUNCH Images The Door: Even Dark Frames Are Useful | PUNCH mission \*Two dark frames collected from WFI-1 on 2025-04-10 show a few important effects in the darkest 3% of the dynamic range: low detector read noise, dual-readout digitizer offsets, very faint glint comi...

Even before the instrument doors open, we can make useful measurements of the instruments themselves and the radiation environment. We're planning to open all four instrument doors this week and see the stars! 🧪🔭🛰️☀️🚀

Why opening doors in space is a big deal | PUNCH mission This week we're planning on opening doors on two of our four single-instrument spacecraft: the Narrow Field Imager (NFI) and one of the three Wide Field Imagers (WFIs). That's a big deal scientifica...

We expect to open our first two instrument doors on Monday. That's a big deal both scientifically, and for the engineers who poured an incredible amount of effort into making sure it goes well. Wish us luck! 🛰️☀️🚀