NASA’s PUNCH Mission Tests Solar Arrays Before Launch
January 28, 2025
GREENBELT, Md. — NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission team has successfully completed a critical test of the spacecraft’s solar arrays. The arrays will provide power for the PUNCH spacecraft as it travels to the Sun-Earth system’s Lagrange point 1 (L1) and conducts its three-year mission studying the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and the solar wind.
The solar array deployment test was conducted at Northrop Grumman’s Space Park facility in Redondo Beach, California. The test simulated the environment the PUNCH spacecraft will experience during launch and deployment. The arrays successfully deployed and latched into place, providing power to the spacecraft.
“This test is a major milestone for the PUNCH mission,” said Martin Kunc, PUNCH project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The solar arrays are critical to the spacecraft’s success, and this test has given us confidence that they will function as expected during the mission.”
The PUNCH spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2025 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission will study the Sun’s corona, which is the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere. The corona is heated to millions of degrees Celsius, but scientists don’t know how it reaches such high temperatures. PUNCH will also study the solar wind, which is a stream of charged particles that flows from the Sun into the heliosphere.
“PUNCH will provide us with new insights into the Sun’s corona and solar wind,” said Craig DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “This information will help us better understand how the Sun affects Earth and the rest of the solar system.”
The PUNCH mission is a NASA Small Explorer mission. The PUNCH spacecraft was built by Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California. The PUNCH mission is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The PUNCH science team is led by the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
NASA’s PUNCH Mission Tests Solar Arrays Before Launch
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