PUNCH News & Nuggets

The WFI-1 Observatory is now fully integrated! It is the PUNCH fleet leader through environmental testing, which is scheduled to begin this week. On Friday 26-April, the WFI-1 Observatory collected its first science image through the WFI instrument: a team selfie in the Building 299 clean room where PUNCH I&T is proceeding. The image includes the WFI baffle “horizon” (at left, as the Observatory was on its side in the mounting cage), the massive doors into the high bay, one of the other Observatories in the background, and seven team members who were conducting the test. From left to right: Kelly Smith, Jim Foster, Ronnie Killough, Glenn Laurent, Emily Fisher, Brandon Perez, and Tonya Brody, all in cleanroom garb, with another PUNCH spacecraft visible just over Tonya’s shoulder.

The PUNCH PI Craig DeForest and PUNCH Outreach Lead Cherilynn Morrow presented, live at the Cotton Bowl Stadium, the mission and its relevance to solar eclipse viewing and sunwatching across time and space.

After six years in use the PUNCH logo got a makeover in April. The newer rendering is similar to the old, but with some important fixes. The central swoops now reproduce better in more different media. The diffraction spikes on the stars work correctly (all facing the same direction). Additionally, the new render is a scalable SVG file, allowing reproduction on media of all sizes from pop-sockets to Falcon 9 stages.

The PUNCH instrument, spacecraft, and integration teams presented the status of the mission to NASA and the PUNCH Standing Review Board (SRB) on the 27th and 28th of February, in the first SRB meeting since Critical Design Review in 2022. The PUNCH instruments are being integrated to the spacecraft now, in preparation for flight. The Pre-Environmental Review (PER) ensures that all is well before the completed Observatories undergo final testing for flight: vibration, thermal performance in vacuum, etc.

The Southwest Research Institute WFI team have delivered their first flight instrument (WFI-1) to the Integration and Test team for integration onto a flight PUNCH Observatory! WFI is a wide-field heliospheric imager, similar to an externally occulted coronagraph with a linear geometry. It will view a 40° wide field-of-view extending from 4.5° to approximately 45° from the Sun. WFI-1 will be integrated to a PUNCH spacecraft later this winter, in preparation for observatory environmental testing through the spring of 2024. PUNCH is scheduled to launch by early April of 2025.

The topic of this telecon was in-situ/remote-sensing/modeling synergies. Click to go to meeting page with links to presentations.

The Naval Research Laboratory team has completed integration and test of the PUNCH Narrow Field Imager (NFI), and delivered the instrument to SwRI for integration into the PUNCH Observatories! NFI is an externally occulted coronagraph based on NRL’s CCOR design. it covers the central part of the PUNCH field of view, from approximately 5 to 32 solar radii from the Sun itself. NFI will be the first primary instrument integrated to a PUNCH Observatory, in late calendar year 2023, and will fly with the rest of PUNCH when the mission launches (est. April 2025).