Latest news with #PUNCH
Forbes
4 days ago
- General
- Forbes
These Seven Jaw-Dropping New Photos Of The Milky Way Will Inspire You
During commissioning, PUNCH's NFI instrument captured this image of the new Moon as it passed by the ... More Sun in the sky on April 27, 2025. The moon is completely invisible today — or is it? With the sun and Earth on opposite sides of the moon, our natural satellite reaches its most enigmatic phase — the new moon. From our point of view on Earth, it's entirely lost in the sun's glare, so impossible to see. However, a new NASA mission is able to detect the new moon thanks to 'Earthshine' and its unique cameras. The is 0% illuminated today, having aligned almost perfectly with the sun and Earth at 11:02 p.m. EDT on May 26 26, 2025. That was the moment of the new moon when its Earth-facing side was entirely in darkness. It's a moment that astronomers refer to as syzygy, as is the moment of the full moon for two weeks on either side when the sun and moon are on opposite sides of the Earth. This month's new moon is the third-closest new moon of the year at 223,720 miles (360,044 km) from Earth, making it a supermoon. That's a colloquial term for what astronomers call a perigee moon — a moon that is as close as possible in any given orbit. It occurs because the moon's orbit around Earth is elliptical, so it must have a farthest (apogee) and closest (perigee) point. NASA's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission — a constellation of four satellites that launched on March 11, 2025 — took a unique image of a new moon as it passed by the sun on April 27, 2025. Only published last week, the image is the first one ever of a new moon aside from during a total solar eclipse. PUNCH is a Southwest Research Institute-led mission that will seek to image how the sun's outer corona becomes the solar wind. It comes from a Narrow Field Imager camera on one of the PUNCH satellites. It was able to grab the image during commissioning thanks to the delicate Earthshine light on the Earth-faxing side of the moon. Earthshine is sunlight reflected off Earth's ice caps, clouds, and oceans and onto the moon. The dark circle in the image is not the sun but the occulter on the camera that is designed to block the sun, allowing images to be taken of the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere, and where the solar wind comes from. During testing, PUNCH also captured 'space rainbows.' The next full moon is the full strawberry moon at 3:45 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 11, 2025, 10 days before the solstice on Saturday, June 21, 2025. It takes its name from the ripening of summer berries in North America during June. The strawberry moon will be the sixth of 12 full moons in 2025. Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'Space rainbow' captured by NASA's newest sun-studying spacecraft
The largest rainbowlike feature ever observed in the solar system was just captured by a newly launched spacecraft, as NASA scientists work to better understand the sun and forecast space weather. NASA's PUNCH mission, made up of four Earth-orbiting spacecraft, is focused on studying the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. One of the first images from PUNCH, released earlier this month, appears to show a massive rainbowlike feature in the solar system. The rainbowlike feature in the image is very different from the rainbows most people are familiar with. On Earth, rainbows form when raindrops refract sunlight like a prism, creating an arc of colors across the sky. In space, this phenomenon was caused by sunlight reflecting off dust particles in the solar system-a glow known as zodiacal light. "The image is colorized to show the polarization (or angle) of the zodiacal light, a faint glow from dust orbiting the Sun. Hue indicates direction, and saturation indicates degree of polarization," NASA explained. "For example, a pastel green feature would be slightly polarized in the horizontal direction, while a deep blue feature would be strongly polarized in a diagonal direction." As mesmerizing as the image looks, it is the first step of the mission to study the sun. "These early images help the mission team confirm that PUNCH's cameras are in focus, working properly, and able to capture the quality observations needed to achieve the mission's goals." Once fully functional, PUNCH will help scientists monitor and predict space weather, including when the aurora could dance in the night sky.
Forbes
20-05-2025
- Science
- Forbes
In Photos: See The Stunning ‘Space Rainbows' Captured By NASA
On April 18, 2025, the WFI-2 instrument on NASA's PUNCH spacecraft created this view of the zodiacal ... More light, a faint glow from dust orbiting the sun. There are no rainbows in space, but the next best thing has been snapped by a new NASA spacecraft now orbiting Earth while testing its cameras. The spacecraft, called PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere), is about to begin investigating how the sun's outer corona — by far the hottest part of our star's atmosphere — becomes the solar wind that causes the Northern Lights. The PUNCH mission blasted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on March 11, 2025. Also in the rocket's fairing was NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) observatory. PUNCH isn't a single spacecraft. It comprises four small satellites that together create a single 'virtual instrument' that spans the whole PUNCH constellation. The aim is to make 3D observations of the sun's corona for at least two years. It's hoped that by doing so, scientists will better be able to figure out how the sun's corona becomes the solar wind and so more accurately predict space weather. That's crucial because solar wind can greatly affect satellites and robotic explorers in space. Captured on April 16, 2025, this is the first image taken by PUNCH's WFI-1 instrument. The ... More instrument's wide field of view reveals the glow of zodiacal light stretching up and to the right. The V shape of the Hyades star cluster appears near the top, with the more compact Pleiades star cluster to the lower right. A rainbow is an optical illusion created by sunlight refracting and being reflected inside droplets of liquid in an atmosphere. That's not going to happen in space. PUNCH's 'space rainbows' are unique images of what astronomers call the zodiacal light, a triangular beam of light that can be seen on the horizon a few hours before sunrise or after sunset as the false dawn or false dusk. PUNCH's stunning polarimetric triplet images are a combination of three images (red, green and blue) of sunlight being reflected by space dust. They were created during imaging tests of three polarizers on PUNCH on April 18, 2025, with the light colorized based on its angle (polarization). For a few weeks in late September and October, a triangular beam of light appears on the eastern horizon a few hours before sunrise before gently fading. This is the "false dawn." In March and April, the opposite happens as a triangular beam of light appears on the western horizon a few hours after sunset — the "false dusk." So-called zodiacal light — literally "light from the circle of animals" — is the glow of the solar system. Reflected sunlight from interplanetary dust around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter radiates across the (visible) optical spectrum and beyond. Depictions of two kinds of dust in space: At left the pyramid-shaped glow of Zodiacal Light caused ... More by sunlight reflecting off interplanetary dust in the inner solar system from comets and meteoroids, while at right is the band of the bright Milky Way, made of stars in our galaxy. (Photo by: VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) It's called the zodiacal light because it appears above where the sun has just set/is about to rise, so along the ecliptic — the path of the sun through the daytime sky. This is the plane of the solar system, and it's where you'll find the belt of constellations across the night sky that the sun moves through in a calendar year — hence star signs. The 12 'signs' of the zodiac are all officially recognized astronomical constellations: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. There's also a thirteenth, Ophiuchus, a huge constellation that the sun also passes through. Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA Mission Captures Eerie New View of The Moon And Sun
A new NASA mission to map the solar wind has returned some of its first images from its position in low Earth orbit. The Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission launched on 11 March 2025, and its early glimpses of the Solar System and the space beyond are both eerie and fascinating. Each of PUNCH's four satellites carries an imaging instrument – one narrow-field and three wide-field, to capture different aspects of the solar atmosphere as it transitions into the solar wind and blows through the Solar System. The aspect captured by the narrow-field imager (NFI) is perhaps the eeriest of all. This instrument is a type of coronagraph, which includes an attachment called an occulter that sits in the middle of the field of view and blocks out the Sun's disk. This allows fine details of the solar atmosphere, or corona, to be seen, in the same way details of the corona can be seen during a solar eclipse. In the image from PUNCH's NFI, the occulter is not quite fully aligned with the Sun, which means some of the Sun's light leaks through the image in interesting ways. Around the edge of the occulter, a bright ring of diffracted light can be seen, while a larger halo of light bouncing off the occulter dominates the image. Within this halo floats the new Moon, fully illuminated by the Sun's light reflecting off Earth. The visuals from the wide-field imagers (WFIs) are just as fascinating, all of them showing constellations and star clusters, with the Pleiades making an appearance in all three. From WFI-2, we get this gloriously rainbow-tinted image of the stars. Although we can't see those hues with our own eyes, they do represent something real. The spacecraft is equipped with a filter that allows it to determine how light is polarized, its waves aligned in a particular orientation. When light travels through and bounces off matter, it can become polarized. WFI-2 used its filters to detect the polarization of sunlight scattering off the interplanetary dust that orbits the Sun on the plane of the Solar System. This scattering creates a phenomenon known as zodiacal light that can be seen in dark night skies most strongly around the annual equinoxes. The hues and saturations indicate the direction and strength of the polarization of zodiacal light in WFI-2's image. The images from WFI-1 and WFI-3 are pretty similar to each other, showing zodiacal light stretching upwards, from slightly different angles. The Hyades, a V-shaped cluster of stars, and the Pleiades, a cluster resembling a scoop, can be seen at the top middle and slightly down and to the right in the WF-1 image. Meanwhile, in the WF-3 image, the Pleiades cluster appears at nine o'clock, with the constellation of Cassiopeia at the top. All four images, NASA says, provide confirmation that all the instruments are working as they should. Now, the ground team will be working on calibration, after which the true science work will commence. If we're lucky, though, even this early phase of the mission will yield some observations that help us understand how the Sun generates the wind that carves out the Solar System's bubble in the Milky Way galaxy. Mysteriously Perfect Sphere Spotted in Space by Astronomers The Most Violent Solar Storm Ever Detected Hit Earth in 12350 BCE Dark Matter Could Be Evolving, And The Implications Are Profound
BBC News
19-05-2025
- Science
- BBC News
PUNCH mission: Nasa snaps a picture of a rainbow in space
Nasa has released a picture of a rainbow in space!The image was created by putting together photos taken by three instruments from their newly-launched PUNCH mission. It's the first rainbow-coloured view of the sky to be taken by the US space expedition is hoping to reveal new details about how the Sun's corona moves through the solar system as the solar wind. What's happened? PUNCH is the first mission designed to measure the corona and solar wind in 3D, by studying the direction light travels. Last month, a camera on board one of the four satellites which make up PUNCH took three images in succession to create the multi-coloured view. The image shows the faint glow from dust orbiting the Sun. The different colours represent the different strengths and directions of light and the finished picture gives scientists new information on the movement of solar to Nasa, these early images also help the mission team confirm that PUNCH's cameras are working properly. What is Nasa's PUNCH mission? Nasa's Punch mission is made up four small satellites which are in low Earth orbit, observing the Sun and its to the US Space Agency, the plan is for them to make a global 3D picture of the entire inner heliosphere - that's the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun which surrounds the planets and the Kuiper doing this, Nasa hope to find out more about how the Sun's outermost layer of its atmosphere - called the corona - becomes the solar mission was launched in March 2025 and is expected to last around two years.
