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SAN ANTONIO May 24, 2021 On May 20, 2021, the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission achieved an important milestone, passing NASA s Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of its spacecraft and payload experiments. Southwest Research Institute is leading PUNCH, a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission that will integrate understanding of the Sun s corona, the outer atmosphere visible during total solar eclipses, with the solar wind that fills the solar system. Passing PDR gets us one step closer to launch, verifying the design options, interfaces and verification methods for the mission, said PUNCH Principal Investigator Dr. Craig DeForest of SwRI s Space Science and Engineering Division. In this challenging year, I m so proud of this team for acing this important design cycle review, from refining the spacecraft design to actually building an engineering model of the Wide-Field Imager (WFI) instrument and other technology we need to image the solar
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SAN ANTONIO April 27, 2021 The Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission has selected four early career scientists as associate investigators to pursue solar science under the mentorship of senior PUNCH science team members. Southwest Research Institute is leading PUNCH, a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission that will integrate understanding of the Sun s corona, the outer atmosphere visible during total solar eclipses, with the solar wind filling the solar system.
The solar wind, a supersonic stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun, fills the heliosphere, the bubble-like region of space encompassing our solar system. Its boundary, where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance, ends the sphere of the Sun s influence.
Scientists used image processing on high-resolution images of the sun to reveal distinct “plumelets” within structures on the sun called solar plumes. The full-disk sun and the left side of the inset image were captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light and processed to reduce noise. The right side of the inset has been further processed to enhance small features in the images, revealing the edges of the plumelets in clear detail. These plumelets could help scientists understand how and why disturbances in the solar wind form. Credits: NASA/SDO/Uritsky, et al.