Spacecraft To Probe How Earth Fends Off Raging Solar Winds

Spacecraft To Probe How Earth Fends Off Raging Solar Winds

Particularly fierce solar storms can knock out satellites, threaten astronauts - and create colourful auroras in the skies of northern and southern latitudes.

Europe launches a new mission to image Earth's magnetic shield in 2026 while the operational satellite warning of solar storms is a 1995 spacecraft running 28 years past retirement — the gap between discovery science and operational continuity within a si

In a clean room in French Guiana, technicians are preparing a spacecraft called Smile — the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer — for launch. The mission, a joint venture between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will spend years in a highly elliptical orbit, sweeping above the North Pole to capture X-ray and ultraviolet images of Earth’s magnetic shield as it deflects the solar wind. An ESA mission upd…