PUNCH mission images huge solar eruption

Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Craig DeForest discussed the latest accomplishments of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission during a media event at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

As the spacecraft constellation completes commissioning, early PUNCH data showed coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, as they erupted from the sun and traveled across the inner solar system.

“These preliminary movies show that PUNCH can actually track space weather across the solar system and view the corona and solar wind as a single system,” said DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator from SwRI’s Space Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado…

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