New look at solar winds: NASA's "Punch" mission delivers first images
Four small NASA satellites are to provide new insights into solar winds. The first images are promising.
A graphic shows the four Punch satellites orbiting the earth with the sun in the background.
(Image: NASA)
The US space agency NASA has published the first images of the sun taken by the four small satellites on the Punch mission. Punch stands for "Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere" and aims to better understand the formation of solar winds.
In very simple terms, solar winds are mass and energy from the solar corona, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere, which becomes a stream of charged particles and spreads through the entire solar system. Solar winds of this kind also give rise to auroras, for example.
Suitcase-sized satellites
Four suitcase-sized satellites orbiting the Earth will work together on the mission to create images of the entire inner solar system, which will allow the solar winds to be captured and tracked in real time, NASA reports. Each of the satellites can take images, and their combined images will be used to create 3D images of the solar winds. While one satellite with a "Narrow Field Imager" (NFI) is responsible for close-up images of the sun, the other three with their "Wide Field Imagers" (WFI) can take images at an angle of up to 45 degrees away from the sun.
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The NFI is a coronagraph that shields the bright light of the sun in order to better recognize details in the sun's corona. In the case of WFIs, NASA refers to heliospheric imagers that observe the very faint, outermost part of the sun's corona and the solar wind itself. The combination of the two technologies makes it possible to track both the formation of individual solar winds and their further journey through the solar system.
On Monday and Wednesday of this week, the satellites opened their instrument flaps for the first time so that the first images could be taken. According to NASA, the first image from the NFI shows star fields and the sun near the center of the image. The image was filtered to highlight the star fields in the background, which were obscured by the zodiacal light, a very faint, diffuse glow of dust orbiting the sun.
(Image:Â NASA)
In this early phase, the main focus is on getting the system up and running and calibrating the cameras correctly. The aim is to filter out 99 percent of the light from the sun's corona. This should make it possible to track the fine threads of solar material that flow from the sun's atmosphere into space.
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The first WFI image is intended to demonstrate the size of the camera's field of view by focusing on well-known constellations such as Taurus (the Bull) and Eridanus. The orange light is the zodiacal light filtered out in the previous image.
(Image:Â NASA)
The satellites were launched into space in mid-March aboard a SpaceX rocket together with NASA's SPHEREx telescope.
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