“In the wee hours of 31 May 2025, billions of tons of charged particles erupted from the Sun and began to hurtle in our direction. Spacecraft tracked the liftoff of that huge burst of plasma, enabling U.S. officials to predict when the eruption would strike Earth, within a 12-hour window. But a new view of the Sun’s roiling outer atmosphere could have enabled scientists to peg the solar storm’s arrival time much more precisely—to within just half an hour.

That precision comes from PUNCH, a NASA mission keeping an eye on a part of space that’s been a blind spot for space weather. Like a sensitive 3D camera whose field of view covers half the sky, it watches everything escaping the Sun’s atmosphere and traveling toward us. 'We can track space weather all the way across the inner Solar System,' says Craig DeForest, the mission’s principal investigator.

He and his colleagues have now shown that based on those observations, they could have forecast within minutes when the 2025 storm would have struck Earth’s magnetic field, threatening satellites, power grids, and other technologies.”

From Science.