On May 19, a joint European-Chinese spacecraft blasted into orbit from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guyana, on the northeastern coast of South America, reported Phys Org. This is the first time that the ESA and China have jointly selected, designed, implemented, launched and operated a mission together.
The spacecraft—the Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE)—is a joint project of the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will fly in an extremely elliptical orbit over Earth’s poles—5,000 km altitude at the South Pole, and 121,000 km at the North—to study the effects of the solar wind on Earth’s magnetosphere, which protects Earth from many types of charged particles. It will allow us to “observe the northern lights non-stop for 45 hours at a time for the first time ever.”
Technically speaking, Earth is bathed in the atmosphere of our Sun; the solar wind is a constant flow in all directions of charged particles emanating from the Sun. Eugene Parker (1927-2022), for whom the Parker Solar Probe is named, coined the term “solar wind.” At times, there are solar storms which can generate Coronal Mass Ejections—explosions of massive amounts of plasma hurtling towards Earth at 2 million km per hour. Most of the time, our magnetosphere shields us from these powerful outbursts, but from time to time, they break through, creating blackouts and disrupting communication systems.
The SMILE is designed to not only detect these particles, but to “detect the X-rays emitted when charged particles from the Sun interact with the neutral particles of Earth’s upper atmosphere.” In the words of ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher: “We are about to witness something we’ve never seen before—Earth’s invisible armor in action.”
