RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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It was accurate to within a half hour during initial tests.
NASA/PUNCH/SwRI In March 2025, NASA launched the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere ( PUNCH ) mission in an effort to better understand solar weather. It consists of a constellation of four microsatellites, monitoring the sun 24/7. Those satellites started taking images of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are explosive expulsions of materials from the sun into space, as soon as they arrived in orbit. Now, the PUNCH team has taken those images and data to show how much the mission can improve solar storm forecasts.
The scientists used continuous imagery of a coronal mass ejection that the PUNCH satellites took on May 31, 2025 to see if they could improve forecast modeling for solar storms. A CME causes solar storm, which happens when the solar materials from the blast reach Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field.
The team fed the data into a computer model, which analyzed the edges of the CME over time and then used its speed and shape to calculate when it would reach Earth. It ultimately predicted after analyzing the first 12 hours of the coronal mass ejection, that the solar storm would arrive on Earth eight hours later. It was accurate to within half an hour, making it much better than current methods that have an error margin of five hours. That's because before PUNCH, our instruments could only track one-fifth of the CME's journey from the sun to our planet. PUNCH allows scientists to track CMEs all the way through and even captures images once every four minutes.
"We thought PUNCH would be good at this, but it's a stunning result," said Craig DeForest, the principal investigator for PUNCH at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "To put it in perspective, this could be the space weather equivalent of going from a steam engine to a modern internal combustion engine."
Solar storms can cause geomagnetic storms in the Earth's magnetic field, which could then lead to radio blackouts and power outages. They could also affect satellites orbiting our planet and even our internet connections. Being able to predict when they'll happen more accurately can help mitigate their effects.
The PUNCH scientists presented their results as an initial proof of concept in a paper currently being reviewed for the Space Weather journal. They believe that with even better models and more refined data from PUNCH, it would be possible to forecast solar storms even further in advance.
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