Following a successful launch in the early hours of Wednesday morning (12 March 2025) U.K. time, the PUNCH spacecraft are poised to begin their two-year mission to study the sun's outer atmosphere and its transformation into the solar wind.

The SPHEREx telescope will create the most colorful map of the cosmos, while the four satellites of the PUNCH mission track the evolution of the solar wind in three dimensions.

NASA is now targeting an evening launch window for PUNCH and SPHEREx that opens at 10:09 P.M. EST on Tuesday, March 4. On March 2, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission into low Earth orbit.