Joint ESA-China SMILE mission set for launch to study Earths magnetic shield
HELSINKI - A pioneering joint ESA-China science mission to study Earth's magnetosphere is set to launch May 19, after a decade of preparations.
The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) mission, jointly developed by the European Space Agency and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is set to launch on a Vega C rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, in South America at 11:52 p.m. Eastern May 18 (0352 UTC or 0052 local time May 19).
The mission aims to improve our understanding of Earth's magnetosphere and how it interacts with solar wind, solar storms and space weather, with implications for infrastructure in orbit and on Earth. The mission was selected competitively in 2015 from among 13 proposals spanning in astrophysics, heliophysics and fundamental physics made by joint ESA-CAS teams.
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The 2,200-kilogram Smile spacecraft, including 1,500 kg of propellant, will be launched into a 70 degree inclined orbit, then use around 90 percent of its propellant over a period of a month to enter its highly inclined, highly elliptical orbit around Earth, Smile will reach an apogee of around 121,000 kilometers above the North Pole, allowing it to view the Sun-facing edge of Earth's magnetic field with wide-field X-ray (SXI) and ultraviolet (UVI) cameras.
In this specialized orbit, the three-year primary mission will see Smile spend around 40 hours of each 2-day orbit observing the impacts of the solar wind and coronal mass ejections on Earth's magnetosphere and knock-on effects in the ionosphere, bringing new insights into how the Sun and Earth interact.
"By actually seeing that shape, by seeing that whole region, we're going to get a far better understanding of this interaction between the Sun and the Earth," said Colin Forsyth, Smile's European co-principal investigator, during a pre-launch press conference March 26.
"This magnetosphere deflects these charged particles around us. It captures some of them, and it protects us from these charged particles, from actually getting down into our atmosphere and causing major problems for us here on the Earth," says Forsyth.
In 1989, a geomagnetic storm briefly brought down Quebec's power grid, while the Carrington Event in 1859, the most intense solar storm in recorded history, caused global aurora displays and interfered with telegraph systems. A similar level event in a much more technologically advanced age would imperil spacecraft, astronauts and cause economically devastating electronic disruption on the ground without early warning.
"This is the sort of thing that we want to understand," Forsyth said of the magnetosphere. "How does this system work? How does the system protect us? And when does it break down? How does it end up giving little glitches, or even big glitches, that can potentially cause hazards to infrastructure on ground."
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Smile will provide the first global X-ray imaging of the magnetosphere-a vast, comet-shaped region surrounding the Earth-using solar wind charge exchange emission, comprising soft X-rays and extreme ultraviolet light, produced when highly charged solar wind ions interact with neutral atoms.
The soft X-ray SXI, developed by the UK's Leicester University, uses lobster-eye optics along with some of the largest CCDs ever flown in space, with detector heritage coming from the Plato (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars), set to launch in 2027. The CCDs need to be cooled to minus 120 degrees Celsius, presenting its own engineering challenge, including close cooperation between the European and Chinese sides.
In addition to SXI and UVI are in-situ ion analyzer and magnetometer instruments that complement the imagers. Smile will also perform 45-hour continuous aurora observations. While probing the underlying physics of Sun-Earth interaction, the mission won't be serving as a real-time space weather monitor.
SMILE marks the first time the two sides have jointly designed, implemented, launched and operated a mission. ESA is providing the launch for the mission, the payload module, with Airbus as the prime, along with one of the four payloads. CAS, meanwhile, is responsible for three scientific instruments and the mission and science operations. Data will be sent to the O'Higgins Antarctic ground station operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and China's Sanya ground station.
ESA science director Carole Mundell said the collaboration demonstrated that science can unite teams across political divides.
The mission was earlier scheduled to launch April 9, but was postponed after discovery of a technical issue on a subsystem component production line after integration of the Vega C VV29 launcher. The postponement follows years of delays, with the mission initially targeted for a 2021 launch. Issues included a move to change a number of components following an export control assessment in 2020, as well as the impacts of the outbreak of COVID 19. The delays mean the mission will not be launching during the once-every-11-year solar maximum as planned, though still close enough for its science objectives.
The cooperation builds on the earlier success of the Double Star mission, though there are currently no concrete plans for future collaboration on space science. More broadly, ESA has shelved plans to send astronauts to the Tiangong space station, while China's partnership with Russia largely precludes collaboration in lunar exploration.
The launch from Kourou will be the seventh of the Vega C, and the first in which Italian company Avio takes on the launch operator role.
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