Overview
- SMILE, which launched Tuesday on a Vega‑C rocket from Kourou, reached a roughly 700‑kilometer orbit and deployed its solar arrays, according to ESA.
- The spacecraft will fire its thrusters over the coming weeks to enter a highly elongated path that swings from about 5,000 to 121,000 kilometers from Earth.
- The satellite carries four instruments, including an X‑ray imager to capture the otherwise invisible boundary of the magnetosphere and a UV camera to watch auroras for days at a time.
- ESA is running the three‑year research mission with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which shares a reported €260 million cost with ESA and supports European teams in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
- Commissioning will take months before data start to flow, and the results could help safeguard satellites and communications by showing how bursts of solar particles disturb near‑Earth space.