Punch Mission Instruments collects the first image

The Southwest Research Institute-led polarimeter to integrate the coronavirus and the Heliosphere Fair (punch) missions collected the first images into polar orbit around the Earth after its launch on March 11th. The mission’s four small suitcase-sized spacecraft serves as a single virtual instrument, 8,000 miles across from the air, to image the solar corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun, moving into the solar wind to fill the solar system and image the solar corona that defines it.

“We opened the instrument door to our close range field imager (NFI) and one wide field imager (WFI) on April 14th,” said Dr. Punch, Principal of Solar Systems Science Exploration, SWRI in Boulder, Colorado. “On April 16th, two other WFIs opened the door and collected demonstration images of the first lights as well. All four instruments are working as designed. We are excited to finish commissioning on track and have these cameras coordinated.”

The constellations of Punch include one satellite carrying the NFI coronagraph, developed by the US Navy Research Institute, which continuously image the solar corona. The other three are equipped with WFI developed by SWRI, called Heliosphere Majors, designed to see the very faint outer part of the solar coronavirus and the solar wind itself. The characteristic feature of the lean solar wind, which flows from the solar wind at over 1 million miles per hour, is less than 0.1%, as bright as the background of the Milky Way galaxy.

Punch Raw images mainly contain stars and “Zodiacal Light”. This is a dusty dust orbiting the Sun in the inner solar system. Extra care is required to eliminate starfield and zodiac light while maintaining a very faint solar wind signal, as minimal artifacts or mischelibration overwhelms the solar wind signal.

The spacecraft is in the middle of a 90-day commissioning period operated by SWRI’s Mission Operations Center. The Science Mission will then begin in June 2025, and the Science Operations Center will begin processing data that it shares with NASA and the rest of the world.

“Through the commissioning phase, the Punch team has been tuned to adjust the NFI data to remove 99% of the light and show in detail removing amazing material from the atmosphere outside the sun,” DeForest said. “Three WFI ‘First-Light’ images show a field of stars, but the ultimate goal is to remove the field of stars and other background light, and to maintain the faint, faint light of the solar wind as it travels to Earth. ”

During the test run, Punch also demonstrated a novel, water-powered shot glass-sized rocket engine. To run the engine, each spacecraft electrolyzes water and creates small storage of high-pressure hydrogen and oxygen, which burns as fuel. Each cycle provides about one inch (2 cm/s) of “kick” per second, only enough to correct small orbital shifts and stabilize the constellations.

“The punch is the first space mission to rely on this type of engine, carrying a safe, inert, non-toxic propellant,” DeForest said. “Thrusters are more complex than traditional hydrazine rockets, but their safety and stability are valuable.”

Each satellite must be fired hundreds of times and repeatedly during the course of the mission. On April 2, as part of its test run, the WFFI-2 spacecraft demonstrated its first three charge-and-fire cycles, changing orbital speeds compared to other punch spacecrafts, reaching a third of the world’s world to reach its final position.

Inside each instrument, the spatial evaluation science-grade camera developed by RAL Space collects three raw images via three different polarizing filters every 4 minutes. This new perspective allows scientists to identify the exact trajectories and velocity of coronal mass emissions as they move through the inner solar system, improving the current corona graph, which cannot measure only the corona itself and measure movement in three dimensions.