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On Wednesday (Aug. 13), NASA introduced that the 4 satellites of its thrilling new sun-studying mission, PUNCH, have efficiently reached their stations in orbit round our planet. They all lie alongside Earth’s day-night line to earn a steady view of our star.
PUNCH, which stands for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, is supposed to do exactly what its identify suggests. It’s made up of 4 separate spacecraft, every of which NASA likens to the dimensions of a typical suitcase, which have the facility to gather wealthy information concerning the photo voltaic wind.
The photo voltaic wind refers back to the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun at extremely fast speeds — like, a million miles per hour fast. However, even though we know the solar wind is connected to the sun (specifically the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere), it remains unclear where the phenomenon’s precise origin lies. That’s where PUNCH comes in.
The four spacecraft associated with the mission — three wide-field imagers (WFI) and a near-field imager (NFI) — can work together to isolate specific features within the solar wind that may hold clues to the puzzle’s solution.
“We have to have two kinds of instruments,” PUNCH’s principal investigator, Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado previously said during a mission overview. “One that looks close to the sun, where it’s bright, and one that looks farther from the sun where it’s fainter.”
Here’s where we can circle back to the title of PUNCH. The hope is that learning the intricacies of the solar wind can help scientists lay out the link between the sun’s corona and what’s known as the heliosphere. That’s the invisible bubble that surrounds our solar system and acts as the fence between us and the rest of the universe. Indeed, it’s full to the brim of particles emitted from the sun’s corona via the solar wind.
Potentially, PUNCH should be able to unify all of these components; and, to do so, the mission’s quartet of data-collectors must be arranged in our planet’s orbit very particularly so as to maximize solar-wind data collection. This is what the team says has been achieved, as of Aug. 7, with its new update.
“We want to measure the solar wind globally around the star in near real time,” DeForest said in a new NASA statement about PUNCH attaining its formation. “The planet will get in the way in which from the perspective of anyone spacecraft, so we needed to unfold them across the planet to look in every single place unexpectedly.”
“We needed to make the instrument both very removed from the Earth, which might be price prohibitive,” DeForest previously said. “Or, we would have liked to make it as massive because the Earth.”
PUNCH delivered its first gentle photographs on April 18 to the delight of astronomers and area fans. This confirmed that every one 4 devices have been working as designed, which was a significant milestone within the mission’s timeline. (In truth, in response to the brand new NASA launch, these photographs are nearly absolutely processed and stitched collectively to kind an epic mosaic of PUNCH information).
And now that one more milestone has been notched with all 4 devices locked into their cosmic stations, maybe the primary keys to a significant thriller of our photo voltaic system’s brilliant yellow anchor will begin revealing themselves.
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