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’s newest space telescope, called SPHEREx, finally got off the ground this week, after a series of delays that had stalled its launch since late February. From low-Earth orbit, it will gather data on millions of stars and galaxies—and search for the ingredients of life.