This European spacecraft is using x-ray vision to watch Earth’s invisible forcefield

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are gearing up to launch SMILE, a spacecraft designed to tell us something we don’t know about our planet – and its forcefield.

Specifically, there’s one question in particular that SMILE is trying to answer.

And it is a very important question.

Some might even call it an existential question.

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ESA, the European Space Agency, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences call the project SMILE, which stands for Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer.

The goal is to study Earth’s protective magnetic forcefield, and the main idea is to break down and understand how Earth’s forcefield protects our planet from solar wind, which basically consists of a stream of charged particles that could potentially destroy Earth.

According to the ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, SMILE will be orbiting Earth every 51 hours, hovering around our planet 121,000 kilometers away at its farthest point.

For reference, the Moon is located nearly 385,000 kilometers away, while SpaceX’s satellites – the ones that are used for Starlink – orbit Earth at an altitude of over 500 miles.

Most people obviously know about NASA, but ESA is also doing some outstanding work.

Earlier this year, ESA made history by achieving the first precision formation of a spacecraft flying in orbit.

The mission was launched on an Indian rocket at the end of 2024, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the east coast of India.

Obviously, when it comes to space, historically significant players like NASA are still doing most of the heavy lifting – so to speak – but the ESA also deserves a space (apologies for the pun) on that list.