2024年2月2日 · The Southwest Research Institute WFI team have delivered their first flight instrument (WFI-1) to the Integration and Test team for integration onto a flight PUNCH Observatory! WFI is a wide-field heliospheric imager, similar to an externally occulted coronagraph with a linear geometry.

PUNCH is a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission to better understand how the mass and energy of the Sun’s corona become the solar wind that fills the solar system. Four suitcase-sized satellites will work together to produce images of the entire inner solar system around the clock.

The PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission is designed to image and track sunlight scattered off of free electrons in the boundary zone between the outer solar corona and the young solar wind and to track in 3D coronal mass ejections that can drive large space weather events near Earth.

2025年1月24日 · Wide Field Imager (WFI) The Wide Field Imager (WFI) is a heliospheric imager, a device that provides views from 18 to 180 solar radii (45 degrees) away from the Sun in the sky. Heliospheric imagers use an artificial “horizon” and deep baffles to view the very faint outermost portion of the solar corona and the solar wind itself.

The Wide Field Imager (WFI) is a wide-field heliospheric imager (HI) design based on STEREO/HI. It images from 18 to 180 R ☉ on the sky. HI designs are analogous to coronagraphs, but in linear instead of circular geometry. WFI attenuates …

2019年11月28日 · PUNCH is a transformative mission to reveal the as-yet largely unexplored region from the middle of the solar corona out to1 AU from the Sun: i.e., the “young solar wind”. Through direct, global, spatially continuous, 3D deep-field imaging, PUNCH observes the corona and heliosphere as elements of a single, connected system.

The PUNCH WFI instruments are a constellation of three wide-field imagers for the PUNCH Small Explorer mission. The WFI instruments incorporate conventional optics and deep baffles to attenuate stray light and image visible light that is Thompson scattered by free electrons in the outer corona and young solar wind.

PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) is mission in NASA's Small Explorer program (SMEX), which will focus directly on the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and how it generates the solar wind. Composed of four suitcase-sized satellites, PUNCH will image and track the solar wind as it leaves the Sun.

2025年1月22日 · NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH mission, is a constellation of four small satellites in low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the Sun's corona to better understand how the mass and energy there becomes the solar wind that fills the solar system.By imaging the Sun’s corona and the solar ...

NASA’s PUNCH mission is a constellation of four small satellites in low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, to learn how the mass and energy there become the solar wind.