Nasa is preparing to launch a groundbreaking mission to solve some of the biggest mysteries of the Sun and its impact on the solar system.
The US space agency announced details of the PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission this week, revealing how four suitcase-sized satellites will be used to make 3D observations of the Sun’s activity.
Despite the Earth’s proximity to the Sun, there are still fundamental processes and phenomena that we are yet to understand about our closest star.
It is not known, for example, why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, is considerably hotter than its surface. Nasa also wants to find out exactly how solar wind forms, and why it accelerates in speed as it travels through space.
By better understanding solar events like flares and coronal mass ejections, scientists hope to gain new information about how these impact human society and technology – from causing blackouts, to disrupting satellites – as well as provide greater accuracy for space weather forecasts.
“The measurements from PUNCH will provide scientists with new information about how these potentially disruptive events form and evolve, which could lead to more accurate predictions about the arrival and impact of space weather events on Earth and impact on humanity’s robotic explorers in space,” Nasa said.
“By imaging the Sun’s corona and the solar wind together, scientists hope to better understand the entire inner heliosphere — Sun, solar wind, and Earth — as a single connected system.”
The PUNCH mission will also involve creating an artificial total solar eclipse, which will provide an extended, high-definition image of the Sun’s corona to allow for never-before-seen views of this phenomena.
The launch is scheduled for 27 February at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket delivering the four PUNCH satellites to low Earth orbit.
