PUNCH in SPACE!

March 19, 2025 TVO Staff

SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off from Vandenberg SFB, on 11 March 2025, with PUNCH. It’s awesome to consider that three little Tele Vue lenses (about the size of a telescope eyepiece) are sitting up there, in the nose cone, riding up into space like three astronauts from the Apollo-missions. (Crop of NASA+ screen capture).
Credit for all NASA+ captures on this page: “SPHEREx and PUNCH Launch (Official NASA Broadcast).”YouTube, live stream by NASA, 11 Mar. 2025, https://youtube.com/watch?v=BqBUQoPW0Aw.

PUNCH (Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere) consists of four small satellites in a Sun synchronous polar orbit above the day/night terminator of Earth. Three of the suitcase sized satellites contain a Tele Vue designed and manufactured objective lens for the Wide Field Imager (WFI) cameras. Together, this constellation of satellites will study how the energy in the solar corona becomes the solar wind.

SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying PUNCH at over 40km high with all engines burning. (Crop of NASA+ screen capture.)

We hope you all saw the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of the PUNCH satellites on March 11^th, as it was live-streamed on NASA+. The rocket launched after sundown toward the south and a bit west over the Pacific Ocean. This was required to achieve a Sun-synchronous orbit over the day/night terminator. One of the big moments that aired live on NASA+ was when the fairing (nose cone) of the ship separated and revealed the satellites to space. After coasting a while, the individual PUNCH satellites were spring-ejected into space in pairs at about 50-seconds apart.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of PUNCH was visible throughout the Los Angeles area. Click image to see full post on x.com.

Dr. Craig DeForest, the PUNCH Principal Investigator, leads the PUNCH team at Southwest Research Institute. He is Tele Vue’s primary contact for the lens system we developed for the three PUNCH satellites that carry the Wide Field Imagers (WFI). Shortly after successful deployment, Craig passed this message to us from the PUNCH Project Manager.

PUNCH was successfully launched earlier this evening at 8:10:12pm Pacific Time, from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California! Our Mission Operations Center [MOC] at SwRI-Boulder successfully contacted all four spacecraft this evening. Initial indications are that all are healthy and are in Safe-Sun Point mode with the solar arrays deployed! The MOC team will be doing further health and performance assessments via additional passes overnight.

Ronnie Killough
Program Director
PUNCH Project Manager
Space Science & Engineering Division
Southwest Research Institute

Screenshot: Dr. Craig DeForest and Al Nagler exchanging pleasantries on Bluesky Social over the PUNCH launch. (Bluesky Social composite screen captures.)

PUNCH Launch Highlights
PUNCH launched on a rideshare with NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) a 3.5° x 11° wide field near-infrared telescope designed to take all-sky mosaics. It will be used to study the origin of the universe and galaxies. SPHEREx was ejected first followed by the PUNCH constellation.

This link to the start of launch coverage begins the 2-hour NASA+ PUNCH launch coverage on YouTube. Below we have launch highlights that will take you right to the key events in the video.

PUNCH Mission Overview
How PUNCH & SPHEREx Support the Artemis Mission to the Moon
Ten Second Countdown and Launch
Main Engine Cut Off and 2^nd Stage Ignition
PUNCH Mission’s Connection to Ancient Petroglyphs
Fairing Separation exposes the spacecraft to space
‪Dr. Craig DeForest in-person Interview
PUNCH Constellation Deployment. The live stream could only capture one of each pair being deployed.

Screenshot of second deployment of PUNCH spacecraft. — Screenshot of first deployment of PUNCH spacecraft that include NFI and WFI 2. (NASA+ screen capture.)

Screenshot of first deployment of PUNCH spacecraft that include WFI 1 and WFI 3. — Screenshot of second deployment of PUNCH spacecraft that include WFI 1 and WFI 3. (NASA+ screen capture.)

Tracking and Viewing the PUNCH Satellites

As of this writing, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), the American / Canadian agency responsible for space surveillance, has tagged the PUNCH satellites as “Object A” to “Object D” (launched March 12, 2025) with sequential NORAD id number from 63178 to 63181.

Screen grab: NY2YO.com website showing current position of a PUNCH satellite. — PUNCH “Object C” satellite details from object page of N2YO.com.

Currently you can find passes of “Object C” overhead using this link to the N2YO.com website: https://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=63180. This link uses the geolocation of your device’s IP address — which is often some distance from your actual location. If you want more precise tracking, you need to create an account and enter a location. Clicking the “10-Day Predictions …” button on the object page will generate a chart with pass predictions over your area.

Screen grab: NY2YO.com website showing a table of PUNCH satellite flyovers. — PUNCH “Object C” satellite viewing details for the lower-Hudson Valley. Retrieved from “10-Day Predictions” page of N2YO.com.

As of this writing there are no magnitudes listed on the predictions but we are told that the PUNCH objects are about two magnitudes dimmer than Starlink satellites.

We’ll be displaying a prototype of the PUNCH lens at the Northeast Astronomy Forum in Suffern, NY on April 5 & 6, 2025. See https://www.neafexpo.com/ to learn how to attend. If you’re nice, Al will even let you look through it!

For more info on the PUNCH mission and the WFI lens, see our prior blog posts: PUNCH LAUNCH THIS WEEKEND and Solar Cycle 25: Up and Up!

Did you observe, sketch, or image with Tele Vue gear? We’ll like your social media post on that if you tag it #televue and the gear used. Example:

#televue #tv85 #ethos #jupiter

Do you want your Tele Vue images re-posted on Tele Vue Optics’ Social Media accounts? Use this hashtag for consideration:

#RPTVO