Nasa is gearing up for a new and first-of-its-kind solar mission that will closely observe the solar atmosphere and reconstruct the formation, trace origins, and map the evolution of solar winds and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), both of which influence space weather.
The Polarimetry to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will be launched by SpaceX on February 28. PUNCH will be a constellation of four, suitcase-sized satellites each weighing about 64 kg sent to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The expected mission life is two years.
It is the first time that a solar mission has been specifically designed to make use of the polarisation of light to measure the corona and solar wind, that too, in 3D.
Information on space weather and its predictions are vital as any anomaly in space weather can have adverse, direct effects on Earth’s satellite-based communication services, derail GPS-based navigation, cripple power grid operations, and more.
“The measurements from PUNCH will provide scientists with new information which could lead to more accurate predictions about the arrival of space weather events on Earth and impact on humanity’s robotic explorers in space,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in its release.
With its wide field of view, PUNCH will use the four onboard cameras to continuously image the sun’s corona or simply the outer atmosphere. These high-resolution images will help physicists stitch together a 3D image that will help solar astronomers get a detailed view of the structure of the solar wind, and understand the sun’s atmosphere transition to solar wind and the overall forces that act in the corona.
According to the US space agency, PUNCH will have three Wide Field Imager (WFI) and one Narrow Field Imager onboard. Once every four minutes, each of the four cameras will capture three raw images using different polarising filters. In addition, each camera will capture an unpolarised image once every eight minutes.
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When electrons, scattered sunlight and the waves of light align, it is this polarised light that PUNCH will measure using polarising filters, enabling scientists to look into the inner solar system.
“We will be able to see where the CMEs and solar winds are formed, how they evolve and get accelerated, try to pin down on the forces or energies that help them gain speeds and ultimately, how they evolve through the interplanetary space. All this is important for timely prediction of space weather,” said Dibyendu Nandi, solar physicist, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata.
Unlike previous missions to study the sun, particularly its corona, PUNCH’s four-camera setup will operate as a single, virtual instrument to generate large-scale imagery data, making it a unique information-loaded 3D image of the solar corona.
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