Punch is a group of four satellites that will or about the land above the daytime terminator to study the sun. Credit: Conceptual Lab of Image Image Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA
Update Wednesday 12 March 2025: the Spacex Falcon 9 rocket that transported a handful of the Vandenberg Space Force to 23:10 EDT successfully launched on 11 March. At the beginning of March 12, the four satellites of the fist constellation had been lined up and the earth controller confirmed the acquisition of the signal with them.
On March 2, a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the polarimeter to unify the crown and Heliosphere (Punch) mission in low -earth orbit. From this position, his four satellites will have an almost constant vision of the sun to help researchers answer questions about how the activity near our star propagates through the inner solar system, influencing the spatial climate that we experience here on Earth.
A large vision
Developed by the Southwest Research Institute and other partners, the satellites of the size of a suitcase contain sensitive images to polarized light: bright waves in which the direction of the oscillating electrical fields are aligned. From their orbital positioning, the punch satellites will have vision fields that extend from 1.5 ° to 45 ° from the sun. This will give them a view from the crown – the overheated external atmosphere of the sun – up to the distance of the terrestrial orbit. This is a range that lasts from six to 185 times the sun’s radius or from 2.5 million to 80 million miles (from 4 million to 129 million kilometers).
Their combined images will be able to monitor for the next two years, with observations every 4-32 minutes, practically the entire internal sun system to keep an eye on the changes in the sunny crown and the sun wind of the particles that flows constantly towards the outside from the sun. Even more important, they will be able to see how dynamic changes in the internal crown propagate towards the outside in the sun wind away from the sun like the terrestrial orbit.
Electrons in the crown and in the sun winds disperse from sunlight through a process called Thompson Scattering and the resulting light is polarized. Punch Imagers, connected together in a vast virtual imaging system, are sensitive to polarized light and will produce the first films of coronal disorders that evolve into characteristics of the solar wind, such as the ejection of coronal mass and other phenomena still to be discovered. The polarization data will also provide a three -dimensional probe of the solar wind and crown structure.
Imagining the sun
The four punching satellites will Orbide the Earth at an altitude of 385 miles (620 km). Their polar orbit is synchronous of the sun, which will keep them constantly above the terminator that divides the night from the day on our planet as he rotates.
Three 110 pound observers (50 kilograms) host a Wide Field Imager (WFI) tool each and an observatory hosts a narrow field field (NFI). The NFI, developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, monitors an annular visual field or form of tank top around the sun between 6 and 32 sunlight-simile rays on the crimagraph C3 crimagraph on the solar and eliosferic satellite (Soho). The view is dark in the center because the coronagraphs use a disk accompanied to block the intense sunlight from the disc of the sun itself, which allows us to see the material much weaker around the sun.
The NFI also has a sophisticated technology of suppression of the loose light to reduce the light scattered from the sun, the moon and the earth inside the telescope. It is very sensitive to light visible in wavelengths between 450 and 750 nanometers and has a resolution of about 30 “for pixels through its 2148 x 4200 pixels CCD Sensor Area. The telescope area could see about 1.5 arms, which coincide at a little exception so that it is a little exception.
The three WFI observers will simultaneously acquire data that will appear a clover model (three points) on the sky when the data of each observatory are combined in a virtual image. While the terrestrial orbit orbit orbit, the clover model revolves on the sky and builds the entire 90 ° circular visual field with a size from 18 to 180 sunlight.
Each spatial vehicle also transports a X -ray sensor called Student thermal Energetic Activity Module (Steam), designed and built by a team of 50 students from Colorado University through the Space Grant Consortium. The cubic module is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) on one side and is designed to detect X -rays in the soft spectral ranges (0.5–15 Kev) and Dure (5–40 Kev). (The softest X -rays have lower energies, while the toughest X -rays have higher energies.) The students had planned to use this data to study the events of the solar glow and deduce how the coronal plasma is heated during the events of Bagliori.
Unfortunately, a problem with Steam occurred just before launch and the tool was closed to minimize any risks for the mission.
Seeing everything
The goal of this extraordinary network of observations is to monitor individual disorders in the region closest to the sun – called the internal heliosphere – from their origins in the crown to the orbit of the earth. This region of the solar wind is believed in a pastic complex of organized and tangled magnetic fields. Scientists have tried to understand how coronal irregularities are formed and how they evolve over time and space while traveling through the inner solar system. The relationship between small characteristics on a small scale measured in tens of thousands of miles (hundreds of thousands of kilometers) and the characteristics of the solar wind much larger measured in millions of miles (tens of millions of kilometers) is a physics regime that remains poor in data. Scientists expect punching will fill this missing information and allow better modeling of solar phenomena based on physics, with consequent gains in our ability to predict the spatial climate near the earth.
Other objectives of the mission, including understanding how the ejection of Massa Coronale evolve and propagate while reaching the terrestrial orbit and how the fronts of shock generated in the inner crown travels outwards and accelerate the particles along the road. Previous missions such as stereo-a and B have provided stereoscopic views of the ejection of Coronal Massa using similar polarized light imaging, but were limited by smaller visual fields. This will not be the case with Punch, which will look at the development of the tomb cradle of coronal and sun wind disorders in Movielike mode through the entire area of the internal sun system.
But wait … there is more!
The punch mission includes an integrated awareness program with the theme of the ancient and modern observation of the sun.
All humans have ancestors looking at the sun. In the United States, for example, there is evidence for the ancient observation of the sun in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. So, observing the sun today, we are connecting to the people of our past. The awareness program tries to transmit the exploration of the NASA of the sun as a natural extension of the centuries -old dedication of humanity to observe and know the rhythms and mysteries of the sun.
