Smile Satellite Captures Auroral Storm Over North Pole

The joint ESA-Chinese Smile mission has released its first ultraviolet images of a hurricanelike auroral substorm swirling above the North Pole.

A satellite named Smile has captured footage of an auroral substorm raging above the North Pole, showing a hurricanelike swirl of ultraviolet light. According to Scientific American, the observations were taken on July 24, during a particularly large influx of solar particles into Earth's atmosphere, and reveal the full extent of the northern lights in UV light.

IslanderNews reports that with UVI, Smile is now the first spacecraft since 2008 to capture the full ring of northern lights around the North Pole in ultraviolet light. That gap of nearly two decades makes the release a notable milestone for auroral science. The ultraviolet range matters because, as Scientific American explains, storms like this are best viewed there, free of interference from daytime sunlight, letting the satellite watch the entire polar aurora at once.

Smile was launched into a highly elliptical orbit above Earth in May as a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to study solar and geomagnetic storms and space weather. According to Scientific American, ESA says the satellite will record auroras for 45 hours at a time. Auroral storms of this kind are caused by solar wind interacting with Earth's magnetic field, which is precisely the interaction the joint mission was built to observe.

The aurora images are not Smile's only early results. Scientific American reports that the satellite's soft x-ray imager (SXI) also captured the bright remnants of a distant exploding star among its first released images, and that in the future the x-ray camera will be pointed at Earth. With SXI, Scientific American notes, Smile is becoming the first spacecraft to make detailed, long-running x-ray observations of Earth's magnetic field, aiming to better understand our planet's place in space.