After cooperation on SMILE mission, ESA and China chart parallel but separate paths
HELSINKI - ESA and China recently launched the joint SMILE magnetosphere mission after a decade of cooperation but, despite sharing similar goals, another collaboration in space between Europe and China appears distant.
The SMILE (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) spacecraft lifted off on a Vega C rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, May 19, heading for a unique orbit that will take it high above the North Pole to view the Earth's magnetosphere with soft X-ray and UV imagers to study how it interacts with the solar wind. The mission was selected from among a range of 13 proposals formulated by joint teams of scientists from ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), establishing a new framework for cooperation on space science.
Yet, despite the celebrations of the successful launch and the cooperative journey and its architecture, senior officials representing both organizations stopped short of committing to more and deeper cooperation in the future, despite parallel and overlapping interests and activities.
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"We asked the European and the Chinese scientists to work together to build SMILE, and I think that that mechanism for me has been proven with this mission to be very effective," ESA science director Carole Mundell told SpaceNews ahead of the mission's launch in Kourou, describing the process as an incredibly effective mechanism of a bottom-up joint call for proposals. "I'm very hopeful that we will deliver compelling new science that will also then be very important for operational space weather prediction."
Wang Chi, director general of CAS's National Space Science Center (NSSC), noted that this cooperation built on the earlier Double Star mission, another joint ESA/Chinese project to study the effects of the Sun on Earth's environment that launched in 2003 and 2004. "Broadly speaking, the SMILE mission and the Double Star mission, they study space weather. This is related to habitability and why the Earth is suitable for the sustainable development of human beings," Wang said.
Neither Mundell nor Wang presented a concrete plan for what the next step after SMILE could be, despite the selection and approval of SMILE taking place a decade ago.
"We both have to secure our budgets, which is the biggest challenge for both of us. We have lots of lovely ideas, but we need the money, so we need to go to our stakeholders who provide the funding," Mundell said. "We both agreed when we discussed this in China [in March] that we would like to find a way to do a new call like this, but we need that money in the budget."
Both ESA and China have strong interests in habitability, both within the solar system and beyond, forging long-term visions for missions. Both highlighted upcoming missions, but with only limited cooperation.
"Plato will launch in Spring next year, and that will be to search Earth-like planets around sun-like stars, and that's going very well," says Mundell. "Ariel is an exoplanet mission that will launch a few years after that to study the atmospheric history of over 1,000 planets, so we'll be moving to the point where we're looking at climate change on other worlds."
ESA will visit Venus with the EnVision mission to study why Venus is so different to the Earth, while the JUICE mission is already en route to Jupiter aiming to answer whether its icy moons could be habitable. The agency is also building up to a mission to Saturn to tour the icy moons and to land the first ever astrobiology mission on the surface of Enceladus, including flybys through its water plumes.
Wang stated that China's first exoplanet-hunting mission, Earth 2.0, is set to launch in 2029. It will see an observatory positioned at Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 to seek out Earth-like exoplanets as it scans 2 million stars in the Kepler mission star field. China's Jupiter mission and its first to the outer planets, Tianwen-4, is set to launch around 2030 to study Jupiter's satellites before entering orbit around a Galilean moon. "Right now, the proposal is a lander to Callisto," said Wang. This mission will likely see a level of coordination and collaboration between China and ESA.
"We've been talking to our Chinese colleagues about their Jupiter mission," says Mundell. "We will tour past Callisto, so we will already have some information about Callisto, which may be useful for them. So I think there's some organic collaboration in terms of helping one another to make our own missions better. We may well also discuss whether we can help them within that mission design." ESA could also provide assistance in a Chinese solar mission, possibly referring to the Solar Polar Orbit Observatory mission scheduled for 2029.
China has progressed impressively from what was a modest collection of missions a decade ago, when its space science program had yet to take off. Today, it has already established a successful strategic priority program on space science, launched its first two interplanetary missions, collected samples from both hemispheres of the moon, is set to launch its own observatory next year, and eyes a global first Mars sample return mission, Tianwen-3, launching in 2028. It has constructed the modular Tiangong space station which it is looking to expand.
Highlighting the limits of ESA's engagement with China, the agency confirmed in 2023 that it no longer planned to send its astronauts to Tiangong, having neither the budgetary capacity nor the political intention. The first international astronaut to visit the station will come later this year from Pakistan. More recently, Europe has indicated it is pivoting to strategic autonomy amid geopolitical shifts.
China's engagement in space science and exploration writ large is expanding rapidly, with the formulation of a medium and long-term plan for space science and exploration in 2024.
One development which suggests different budgetary environments and stumbling blocks to cooperation is the fact that CAS chose one of the 12 proposals that lost out to SMILE. Discovering the Sky at Longest wavelengths (DSL), based on a joint proposal by Dutch, Polish and Chinese scientists, was selected for China's next round of strategic space science missions. DSL, also known as Hongmeng, will send an array of 10 small satellites sent into lunar orbit before the end of the decade. Nine small spacecraft and one mother spacecraft will use the moon as a shield against Earthly electromagnetic interference to enable it to pick up faint, ultra-long wave signals from the early universe. The Queqiao and Chang'e-4 missions were also used as testbeds for longest wavelength studies. China thus appears to have the budget and direction to go it alone for DSL, despite it being born of a collaborative setting.
The SMILE model appeared to show that deep ESA-China cooperation in space science can work. That it has not yet produced a successor while both parties are developing parallel paths suggests there are still serious barriers to further collaboration.
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