Every day, Earth faces a relentless attack from the Sun. A usually steady rain of tiny but fierce particles known as the solar wind can sometimes be interrupted by much bigger blasts, just like the one shown at the beginning of this video.
Luckily, we have a defence: Earth’s magnetic field. This shield that Earth holds up against the solar wind and coronal mass ejections is all that prevents our thriving planet from turning into a barren wasteland.
And finally, we’ve reached a moment in history where our scientific tools and technologies are advanced enough to get to the bottom of how exactly this magnetic shield works.
Our latest investigator is a special space mission called Smile. Smile is equipped with a unique toolkit to give us our first complete look at the interaction between the solar wind and Earth.
It will be the first-ever mission to look at the edge of Earth’s magnetic field with X-ray vision, to uncover where and how our shield is hit.
At the same time, it will use ultraviolet vision to record the northern lights for 44 hours at a time, helping us understand how exactly Earth responds to solar storms.
Smile will send the data it collects back down to Earth, mainly to a ground station in O’Higgins, Antarctica. Scientists will dig deep into this data to find out more.
They will tackle big questions like: What happens where the solar wind meets Earth’s magnetic shield? What causes magnetic glitches on the dark side of Earth? And how can we predict the most dangerous threats in advance?
Smile (the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) is a joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
[Video description: An animation showing ESA’s Smile mission watching on as the Sun’s solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field.]