NASA’s PUNCH Mission will study the sun 02/07/2019 – Posted in: Daily News – Tags:

NASA’s PUNCH Mission will study the sun

 

PUNCH- “Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere”

  • The mission is expected to be launched in 2022.
  • PUNCH mission will image regions beyond the Sun’s outer corona.
  • Mission PUNCH is focused on understanding the transition of particles from the Sun’s outer corona to the solar wind that fills interplanetary space.
  • PUNCH will consist of a ‘constellation’ of four suitcase-sized microsats that will orbit the Earth in formation and study how the corona, which is the atmosphere of the Sun, connects with the interplanetary medium.
  • The mission will image and track the solar wind and also the coronal mass ejections – which are huge masses of plasma that get thrown out of the Sun’s atmosphere.
  • The coronal mass ejections can affect and drive space weather events near the Earth.

 

What does PUNCH do?

PUNCH eliminates the blind spots between coronal and heliospheric imagers and at the poles, continuously observing the young solar wind with a global field of view.

PUNCH integrates images from its constellation of small satellites into a global composite each orbit, covering ~6 orders of magnitude dynamic range.

Through a stream of these high-cadence, low-noise, global polarized images in broadband visible light, PUNCH achieves 3D feature localization and unprecedented deep field imaging.

 

Objectives

Understand how coronal structures become the ambient solar wind.

  • How does the young solar wind flow and evolve on global scales?
  • Where and how do microstructures and turbulence form in the solar wind?
  • What are the evolving physical properties of the Alfven surface?

 

Understand the dynamic evolution of transient structures in the young solar wind.

  • How do coronal mass ejections (CMEs) propagate and evolve in the solar wind?
  • How do quasi-stationary corotating interaction regions (CIRs) form and evolve?
  • How do shocks form and interact with the solar wind across spatial scales?

 

India is also planning to send up its own satellite Aditya-L1, a mission to study the Sun’s corona.

 

Source: The Hindu

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