NASA’s PUNCH Just Tracked a Solar Eruption All the Way to Earth for the First Time

NASA’s PUNCH mission is designed to watch the Sun and provide a new way to see solar storms as they travel through space, potentially changing how scientists prepare before they reach Earth. NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission has successfully tested a new method for predicting when solar eruptions will reach Earth. Using continuous images of a coronal mass ejection (CME), scientists estimated its arrival time within 30 minutes during an initial proof-of-concept study. The launch of PUNCH in 2025 changed the way scientists follow these events. A New Way to Track Solar StormsBefore PUNCH, scientists could observe a CME for only about one-fifth of its journey from the Sun to Earth.