NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission released its first images of large solar eruptions, or coronal mass ejections.
The mission’s highly sensitive, wide-field instruments were able to capture the eruptions as they evolved in space, in much greater detail than previously possible. This big-picture view is essential to helping scientists better understand and predict space weather, which can disrupt communications, endanger satellites, and create auroras at Earth.
The images were taken with PUNCH’s four cameras, which work together as a single “virtual instrument”: three Wide Field Imagers, which observe the faint, outermost portion of the Sun’s atmosphere and solar wind, work with a Narrow Field Imager, a coronagraph that allows scientists to see details in the Sun’s atmosphere by blocking out the bright light of the Sun itself.
