The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) is a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences which launched in mid-2026 to explore how the solar wind and Earth’s magnetosphere interact. SMILE will simultaneously monitor Earth's highly dynamic magnetic field and the response of the northern hemisphere aurora (northern lights) using two imaging cameras. One of these cameras points at where the solar wind first hits Earth’s magnetic field, and the other points back at Earth. This will be the first time that real-time images of the boundary between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field will be tracked over long periods, giving us a novel cause-and-effect perspective. We are still in the early days of the mission, so we are at an exciting period of understanding the initial data from the spacecraft. This talk will explore how SMILE is helping to answer long-standing questions regarding Earth’s magnetosphere. We will see how the global solar-terrestrial community will use other experiments, both on the ground and in space to unravel these questions at large, medium and small scales.
About the speaker
Jenny Carter is a research fellow and lecturer in the Planetary Sciences group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Leicester. Prior to Leicester, Jenny worked in a national laboratory and at the European Space Agency’s European Space Astronomy Centre as a Young Graduate Trainee. Her astronomy career started as part of a team supporting the XMM-Newton mission, and her PhD thesis explored X-ray emission from Earth’s exosphere. This X-ray emission was previously considered a nuisance, but has since led to future mission concepts such as for SMILE. Since 2013 Jenny has worked in the field of magnetospheric-ionospheric coupling. She leads the SMILE Ground-based and Additional Science Working Group and the Super Dual Aurora Radar Network Spacecraft Working Group. Jenny is an alumna of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science Rising Talents UK & Ireland award 2020. She was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Caroline Herschel’s prize lectureship and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in 2021. Jenny is passionate about the public engagement of science and making science a part of everyone’s culture, regardless of background.
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