PUNCH Science Operations Center Data Products and Software

The Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) is a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission to better understand how the mass and energy of the Sun’s corona become the solar wind that fills the solar system. Four suitcase-sized satellites will operate in conjunction to continuously produce visible light images of the entire inner solar system. The PUNCH Science Operations Center (SOC) is responsible for generating and serving calibrated, multi-observatory data products and maintaining the publicly available PUNCH data analysis software packages. To achieve PUNCH’s science objectives, we must remove the stars from the images without leaving significant artifacts. This requires regularizing the point spread function, achieving very precise pointing knowledge, careful mosaicking of images from different spacecraft, and removing the background F-corona signal. Managing a pipeline with so many intricate steps and dependencies is difficult. In this presentation, we report on the progress in developing open source tools for these tasks and how we utilize Prefect, a Python workflow orchestrator, to coordinate execution.