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 and SpaceX successfully launched their SPHEREx and PUNCH missions into orbit Tuesday night from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, to "collect" data on the sun and millions of galaxies.