NASA’s latest space weather mission, PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere), has officially gone online, marking a major leap forward in our ability to monitor and predict solar activity.

The postponement, driven primarily by thick clouds, was the second scrub of the flight since an issue with the rocket on Saturday night.

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.