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PUNCH is an abbreviation (or acronym) for a NASA mission. What do the letters stand for? ● What is the mission designed to do?

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#6. The NASA PUNCH MISSION

The NASA PUNCH Mission studies how the Sun’s corona expands to become the “solar wind” and tracks how solar storms change as they travel between the Sun and Earth.

Left: An artist’s conception of the space between the Sun and Earth that we call the inner heliosphere. There is a solar storm erupting from the Sun’s corona, traveling in the solar wind toward Earth with its magnetic shield (purple). Right: The four turquoise cones around Earth represent the cameras on the four PUNCH spacecraft looking into the solar wind flow to observe and track the storms and other space weather features of the inner heliosphere.

Image credits: NASA and SwRI

Drag and Drop Fill-in-the-Blanks

FITB #6. Challenge Level: High. Word count: 336. # Blanks: 15. Prerequisites: #1 (Where is the Sun?), #4 (Solar Wind), and #5 (Solar Storms).

DRAG & DROP the words into the spaces in the paragraph below to FILL-IN-THE-BLANKS. NOTE: The word will only drop successfully when the cursor tip (or your fingertip on mobile devices) is within the light-colored box above the blank which will turn yellow when the word is properly positioned.
TO UNDO YOUR CHOICE click on the blue circle
next to the dropped word.

solar storms satellite inner corona solar eclipse heliosphere solar wind electrons space weather polarimeter movies Earth four unified polarized sunglasses

During a total

, when the Moon totally covers the Sun’s disk in the sky, our eyes can see the white glow and rays of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, called the solar

PUNCH is a NASA Small Explorer mission consisting of four small, Earth-orbiting spacecraft launched on a single rocket. Each

carries a camera that helps to study how the solar corona expands to become the “solar wind.” This fast flow of electrically charged particles (ions and

) speeds out in all directions from the Sun. The solar wind extends beyond the orbit of Pluto and defines the vast region of space influenced by the Sun called the

. PUNCH studies the

heliosphere between the Sun and Earth.

The

PUNCH spacecraft are spread out in a low orbit around Earth so that the combined view of their cameras can see continuously in all directions around the Sun. The mission studies the inner heliosphere together with the Sun’s outer corona as a single,

system. That’s why PUNCH stands for the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere.

The “P” in PUNCH stands for "

" (pohl-ar-IM-eh-tur) – a device that measures polarization, like a speedometer measures speed or an altimeter measures altitude. Sunlight interacting with the electrons of the

causes the light to be polarized. The polarization filters on the PUNCH cameras are similar to the lenses of

. The mission uses these filters to measure how strongly polarized the light is from

and other types of “space weather.” This measurement tells heliophysicists where such space weather features are located in 3-dimensional (3D) space and how they are moving and changing.

Storms can leave the Sun in any direction so only a few of them can hit

. PUNCH can observe them all and thus monitor the

in the entire inner heliosphere. The PUNCH mission is designed to provide data that lets PUNCH scientists make the best 3D images and

of solar storms ever made!

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