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KOUROU: A joint European-Chinese spacecraft blasted into orbit on Tuesday to investigate what happens when extreme winds and giant explosions of plasma shot out from the Sun slam into Earth’s magnetic shield.
Particularly fierce solar storms can knock out satellites and threaten astronauts — and create dazzling auroras in the skies known as the northern or southern lights. To find out more about this little-understood space weather, the van-sized SMILE spacecraft is tasked with making the first X-ray observations of the Earth’s magnetic field.
The spacecraft achieved lift-off on a Vega-C rocket at 0352 GMT on Tuesday from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America.
A little under an hour later, SMILE detached at 700 kilometres of altitude to make its own way toward an extremely elliptical orbit thousands of kilometres above the surface of the planet. SMILE will be at an altitude of 5,000 kilometres when it flies over the South Pole, allowing it to transmit data to the Bernardo O’Higgins research station in Antarctica.
