Two NASA missions will roadtrip together in orbit in April 2025, the agency has announced.
Aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be five spacecraft, one dedicated to astrophysics and the other four a mission dedicated to solar science. NASA said the “carpooling” arrangement, as they called it, would save expense and hassle, in a statement. (opens in a new tab) released Wednesday (August 3).
“Carpooling is a great way to save money,” Craig DeForest, PUNCH principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in the release.
The dual launch will take place from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
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PUNCH, more formally known as the polarimeter to unify the corona and the heliosphere, will study the solar wind, the constant stream of charged particles flowing from the sun. The four-satellite mission delayed its launch date by two years from 2023 to overcome supply chain issues during manufacturing, the agency added.
The mission will join SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), which is also seeing its launch date pushed back from an original June 2024 target.
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SPHEREx’s mission will not only be to map 300 million galaxies in the universe and 100 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but also to hunt for traces of water and organic (living) molecules. These elements are present in stellar nurseries, or regions filled with gas and dust surrounding young stars.
PUNCH, meanwhile, will examine solar ejections as well as the superheated solar corona, in another agency effort to study the origin of the solar wind. It will complement surveys from the Parker Solar Probe, which periodically dives into the corona to take a close look at this critical region, among other surveys.
The purpose of examining the corona is to better predict space weather, or solar activity that may affect earthlings and satellites near our planet.
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