Esa

At the end of this month a Jupiter-bound spacecraft is going to thread past Earth to steal a tank of speed it can’t buy any other way. On 29 September 2026, ESA’s JUICE — the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer — makes its second solo flyby of our planet, a gravity assist that borrows a sliver of Earth’s own motion around the Sun and hands it to the spacecraft for free. No engine burn does the heavy lifting here. Geometry does. ...

At 03:52 UTC this morning, a Vega-C rocket lifted off from Kourou carrying SMILE — the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer — into a 707 km circular parking orbit. ESA’s New Norcia ground station in Western Australia picked up the spacecraft’s first signal at 04:48 UTC. Solar panels deployed one minute later. The first mission designed to X-ray Earth’s entire magnetosphere in real time is alive and drawing power. I covered the science in detail two weeks ago, before the launch window opened. Now that the spacecraft is actually flying, here’s what happens between today and the first X-ray image of Earth’s magnetic shield — and when the data starts mattering for aurora forecasts. ...

In twelve days, a Vega-C rocket lifts off from Kourou carrying the first spacecraft designed to image Earth’s entire magnetosphere in soft X-rays while simultaneously filming the aurora in ultraviolet. ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ SMILE mission (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) will watch, in real time, how Earth’s magnetic shield deforms under solar wind pressure and trace that energy all the way down to the auroral oval. ...