NASA’s PUNCH mission announces SPHEREx ridesharing and new launch date

NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will be a trip into space with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission share. The missions will start no earlier than April 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9.

“Having a fixed launch date and vehicle is great, and we look forward to working with the SPHEREx team as we carpool to orbit,” said Craig DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. Colorado. “Rideshares are a great way to save money by making better use of each rocket’s capabilities.”

The contract with SpaceX was expanded to include PUNCH and was awarded on July 14, 2022. The PUNCH team was able to adjust their schedule to meet the new start date no earlier than April 2025 and used this new schedule flexibility to mitigate some due schedule constraints due to supply chain challenges.

PUNCH, which consists of four suitcase-sized satellites, will focus on the Sun’s outer atmosphere (the corona) and how it creates the solar wind. The spacecraft will also track coronal mass ejections — large eruptions of solar material that can power large space weather events near Earth — to better understand their evolution and develop new techniques for predicting such eruptions.

The four satellites will orbit the Earth along the day-night line, making it possible to create a continuous, complete view of the corona and inner Solar System. Three of the PUNCH satellites carry identical wide field imagers that together image the corona and solar wind over a 90-degree field of view (up to 45 degrees from the Sun). In skywatching terms, 90 degrees covers that portion of the sky from the horizon to the point directly overhead. The fourth PUNCH satellite carries a narrow field imager coronagraph that will study regions closest to the sun. All four cameras are synchronized during flight, allowing the mission’s science team to seamlessly combine their images into a single large field of view.

PUNCH is managed from the Southwest Research Institute office in Boulder, Colorado. The mission is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which is managed by Goddard for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Southwest Research Institute will build the Wide Field Imagers and will build and operate PUNCH. The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will build the narrow field imagers and conduct optical tests. RAL Space in the UK will provide detectors and calibrations for the mission.