Oxfordshire plays ‘crucial role' in NASA mission heading to Sun this week
While space weather is usually harmless – producing the beautiful displays of the Northern and Southern Lights – severe solar storms can interfere with aspects of everyday life including GPS systems, power grids, and vital global communications on Earth.
Scientists continue to develop our understanding of solar phenomena so we can enhance our resilience to their potential impacts.
A new NASA mission featuring UK-built technology is targeted to launch early morning (GMT) on February 28, 2025, (February 27 Pacific time) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA.
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A constellation of four small satellites in low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the entire inner heliosphere to learn how the Sun's corona becomes the solar wind. (Image: NASA)
This is to explore how the Sun's outer atmosphere (the solar wind) evolves as it expands outwards from the corona into the heliosphere, a vast bubble of charged particles that stretches far beyond Pluto's orbit.
Selected by NASA from five proposals in 2019, the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will use four spacecraft to build 3D maps of the solar wind structure and contribute to efforts to improve space weather forecasting.
Led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in the US, the PUNCH consortium brings together world-leading expertise, including from UK-based teams at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Scientists, engineers and technicians at STFC's RAL Space near Didcot, Oxfordshire have been instrumental in the development of the four suitcase-sized PUNCH satellites.
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NASA are heading the mission. (Image: PA)
As well as contributing to the mission's scientific goals, RAL Space teams have designed, developed, and manufactured the systems for four visible-light cameras that will capture a new perspective of the evolving solar wind.
Once the spacecraft are in orbit, the team at RAL Space will also enact their role as the mission's in-flight calibration lead. Maximum science return from the mission relies on the combination of data from its four satellites, so ensuring accurate calibration is paramount.
Dr Jackie Davies, UK Science Lead for PUNCH at STFC RAL Space, said: 'The PUNCH design builds on RAL Space's extensive heritage in leading and contributing to, solar and solar wind imaging instruments, including our contributions to NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission.
'We're thrilled to be working alongside SwRI, NASA and the US Naval Research Laboratory on this pioneering project and can't wait to see what new insights our technological and scientific input will reveal in the coming months.'
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Dr Nick Waltham, Technology Research and Innovation Theme Lead at RAL Space said: 'Developing and testing the PUNCH camera systems has been an exciting endeavour for our team, made even more meaningful by the additional challenges we overcame during the COVID pandemic.
'This achievement is the result of years of dedication – building on a much longer heritage in similar missions – and the whole team should be incredibly proud as we prepare for launch.
'Their work will play a key role in advancing our understanding of this crucial area of space science.'
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