Smile mission releases its 1st stunning aurora footage!
The Smile mission released its first aurora footage on September 30, 2026. And it’s stunning! The mission is a collaboration of the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Its goal is to understand how the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere, or protective magnetic field.
In the image above, we see the auroral oval glowing in ultraviolet light around Earth’s North Pole. Smile is the first spacecraft since 2008 to capture this complete auroral ring in UV light. And it can watch Earth for a record 45 hours at a stretch. The video covers 00:00 to 00:58 UTC on July 24, 2026, while Smile was still being commissioned in space.
An X-ray challenge
The Smile mission also includes an X-ray camera. But during the testing phase, scientists saw that the X-ray camera was capturing too much stray light. So teams are working on updating settings to fix this issue. They hope that soon they will be able to take a good X-ray image of the magnetopause (where the solar wind meets Earth’s magnetic field). They would also like images of the northern polar cusp. This cusp is a hole near the North Pole where charged solar wind particles funnel toward Earth’s surface.
In total, Smile has four instruments with which to observe sun-Earth interactions. They are a magnetometer, a light ion analyzer, the ultraviolet imager and the soft X-ray imager. ESA says the ultimate goal of Smile is to:
… improve our understanding of solar storms, geomagnetic storms and the science of space weather.
Bottom line: The Smile mission has shared its first footage of Earth’s auroral oval, and it’s a stunner! Read more about the mission here.
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