The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that the Smile (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) mission will launch on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana in late 2025.

Smile is a collaboration between ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The mission marks the first time that ESA and China have jointly collaborated to select, design, implement, launch and operate a space science mission.

The objective of Smile is to measure the solar wind and its dynamic interaction with Earth’s magnetosphere while the spacecraft orbits around the earth. It marks the first ESA mission that will view the full Sun-Earth connection.

The hope is that the mission will provide a greater understanding of the Solar System, particularly space weather and solar storms. This knowledge will help protect space-based technology and the lives of any humans in orbit around Earth, as well as infrastructure on Earth’s surface.

For the past four years, ESA’s scientists have...