Using continuous imagery from NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, scientists predicted the near-Earth arrival of a solar eruption to within 30 minutes in an initial proof of concept test. The results, presented Tuesday at the Committee on Space Research Scientific Meeting and under review at the journal Space Weather, could revolutionize the way Earth-impacting storms are forecasted.
“We thought PUNCH would be good at this, but it’s a stunning result,” said Craig DeForest, principal investigator for PUNCH at Southwest Research Institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division 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 are caused by huge explosions of material off the Sun called coronal mass ejections. Forecasting when the ejections will reach Earth is key for mitigating their impacts on power grids, satellites, and astronauts. However, until recently, coronal mass ejections could not continuously be tracked for much of their journey across the solar system.
That changed in 2025 with the launch of the PUNCH mission, which uses four spacecraft in low Earth orbit to make continuous 3D observations of the inner solar system. Before PUNCH, coronal mass ejections could only be seen as they traversed one-fifth the way from the Sun to Earth, leaving scientists to guess what happened over the rest of the distance. With PUNCH’s wider field-of-view, scientists can now routinely track the solar explosions nearly all the way to Earth, capturing a new image every four minutes.
