Category: Space

A European-Chinese spacecraft built to map the invisible battle between the sun and Earth's magnetic field made it to orbit Monday night, lifted there by a Vega C rocket that departed French Guiana right on schedule.

The SMILE satellite lifted off from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou at 11:52 p.m. EDT on May 18, and about 56 minutes later it was circling Earth in a clean circular orbit 439 miles (707 kilometers) up. No drama, no anomalies. For a mission that has been years in the making between two of the world's biggest space agencies, a smooth launch was exactly the right start.

SMILE stands for Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer, which is a mouthful, but the science behind it is genuinely fascinating. The sun is constantly exhaling a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. When that stream hits Earth's magnetosphere, the invisible magnetic bubble surrounding our planet, the results range from spectacular auroras to crippling geomagnetic storms that can knock out power grids and fry satellites. SMILE's job is to watch that interaction in real time, giving scientists a much clearer picture of how and why it happens.

The mission is a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the division of labor is worth noting. China's academy was responsible for the satellite platform, spacecraft operations, and three of the four onboard science instruments: the Ultraviolet Imager, the Light Ion Analyser, and the Magnetometer. ESA contributed the payload module, the fourth instrument (a Soft X-ray Imager), the rocket itself, and integration and testing services. ESA also had a hand in building the UV imager and will share operations duties once SMILE is up and running.

That four-instrument suite is what makes SMILE more than just another monitoring satellite. Together, the tools will allow scientists to image the magnetosphere's response to solar activity rather than just measuring it at a single point, which is how most space weather observations have worked until now. Think of the difference between a thermometer outside your window and a full weather radar sweep of the entire region.

SMILE is not quite ready to start science operations yet. Over the next 25 days, the spacecraft will conduct 11 engine burns to reshape its orbit from that initial circular path into a highly elliptical one. At its peak, SMILE will swing 75,185 miles (121,000 kilometers) above the North Pole while dipping to just 3,107 miles (5,000 kilometers) over the South Pole. That lopsided orbit is intentional: it gives the spacecraft the wide vantage point needed to watch large-scale magnetospheric dynamics play out.

Once in its working orbit, the mission team will run through a series of instrument checkouts before declaring the spacecraft fit for science. ESA says the first X-ray and ultraviolet images should arrive roughly three months after launch, after which the real work begins. The planned mission lifetime is three years.

The rocket that got SMILE there is itself something of a comeback story. The Vega C is a 115-foot-tall launcher developed by ESA and built by Italian company Avio. It made its debut in July 2022 but suffered a launch failure in December of that year, grounding the vehicle for nearly two years while engineers identified and corrected the problem. Monday's mission was Vega C's seventh flight overall and its sixth success. It was also the first Vega C launch managed by Avio directly; previous missions were handled by Arianespace, the French launch services company.

The practical stakes for missions like SMILE are higher than they might initially seem. Space weather is not an abstract concern for astronomers. A severe geomagnetic storm can induce currents in long electrical conductors on the ground, potentially damaging transformers across wide areas of the power grid. GPS and radio communications degrade during solar events. Satellites in low Earth orbit experience increased atmospheric drag when the upper atmosphere expands during geomagnetic activity, shortening their operational lives. The more precisely scientists can model these interactions, the better operators can prepare and respond.

For ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, SMILE also represents something beyond the science. Large-scale space science collaborations between Europe and China are not especially common, and a successful mission here carries diplomatic weight alongside its research value. The fact that both agencies split hardware responsibilities rather than one simply buying services from the other makes the partnership more substantive than many international space arrangements tend to be.

For now, SMILE is in orbit and healthy, quietly firing its engines over the coming weeks to settle into its final post. By late summer, if everything goes to plan, scientists should be looking at the first X-ray portraits of Earth's magnetosphere taken from a genuinely novel vantage point. The sun will keep blowing. Earth will keep pushing back. And for the first time, there will be an eye in orbit watching the whole thing from above.

The satellite industry has a bold vision for the future: hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of spacecraft circling Earth, beaming internet to remote communities, running orbital data centers, harvesting solar power. It is an ambitious picture. It is also, according to atmospheric researchers, quietly running an uncontrolled experiment on the planet's climate.

A new study published May 13 in the journal Earth's Future finds that the rapid growth of satellite megaconstellations is pumping significant amounts of pollutants into the upper atmosphere, and that without action, this pollution will eventually be enough to alter Earth's climate. The researchers describe what is already happening as "a small-scale, unregulated geoengineering experiment that could have many unintended and serious environmental consequences" — the words of Eloise Marais, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and air quality at University College London who led the research team.

The problem is not just that rockets produce exhaust. It is where that exhaust ends up. Most megaconstellation launches today depend on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which burns kerosine fuel and releases black carbon — soot — into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Unlike pollution from cars, ships, or power plants, which gets scrubbed out of the lower atmosphere relatively quickly, black carbon released at high altitude lingers for two and a half to three years. Marais notes that this makes it roughly 540 times more potent as a climate forcer than the same soot released at ground level. The upper atmosphere is, in this respect, a place where pollution goes to accumulate.

Satellite re-entries add a separate concern. When a satellite burns up on its way back into the atmosphere, it releases aluminum oxides, which have the potential to damage the ozone layer. Launches heat; re-entries corrode. Megaconstellations do both at scale and on an accelerating schedule, because the satellites themselves are designed with short operational lifespans — typically around five years — and get swapped out regularly for newer models. That churn means more rockets going up and more hardware coming down, year after year.

The numbers behind all of this are striking. Since 2020, when the megaconstellation era began in earnest, concentrations of high-altitude air pollution from the space sector have risen significantly, according to the research. On conservative estimates — and the team emphasizes conservative, since actual satellite deployment has consistently outpaced their projections — the global space industry will have released more climate-altering chemicals into the atmosphere by 2030 than the United Kingdom produces in a year. By 2029, pollution specifically from megaconstellation launches is projected to account for more than 40 percent of all space-sector air pollution.

The megaconstellation players driving this growth include SpaceX's Starlink, Amazon's LEO network, and Chinese operators Guowang and Qianfan. Starlink alone now counts more than 10,000 active satellites. The European Space Agency puts the total number of operational satellites currently in orbit above 15,000 — three times the figure from 2020. By 2030, that number could reach 100,000, with continued steep growth expected afterward.

To be clear, the researchers are not saying the sky is falling today. By 2029, the accumulated pollutants will represent roughly one hundredth of the quantity that would be needed to produce meaningful geoengineering effects. But the trajectory matters. Geoengineering — in particular, the concept of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, which involves deliberately seeding the stratosphere with reflective particles to reduce incoming heat — is already understood to carry serious unpredictable risks: disrupted rain patterns, droughts, unforeseen weather changes. The concern Marais raises is that the space industry is inadvertently drifting toward similar territory, without the careful study, the international deliberation, or the regulatory guardrails that any intentional intervention would require.

The modeling her team uses is able to track both climate effects and ozone depletion from projected pollution loads, giving a reasonably clear picture of where the trend leads. What it cannot do is keep pace with the speed of deployment. The satellite industry is simply moving faster than the science can follow, which is itself part of the problem Marais is trying to highlight.

"We need to be taking it far more seriously in terms of regulating the pollution that's coming from launches and reentries," she told Space.com. "There also needs to be far more funding funneled into research to study this because we can't keep up with the space industry."

That gap between industrial momentum and scientific oversight is the crux of the issue. The companies building these constellations are working within existing launch regulations, which were not designed with high-volume, high-frequency megaconstellation operations in mind. Nobody sat down and decided to run an atmospheric experiment. It is an emergent consequence of thousands of individual launch decisions, each one unremarkable on its own, adding up to something researchers now feel compelled to name and study before it becomes much harder to reverse.

Sometime after July 17, a small satellite will lift off from a peninsula in New Zealand carrying what could be one of the more unglamorous but genuinely important pieces of infrastructure for humanity's next chapter in space: a working prototype of a gas station.

NASA and Eta Space, a company based in Rockledge, Florida, are preparing to launch LOXSAT, short for Liquid Oxygen Flight Demonstration, a spacecraft designed to test 11 cryogenic fluid management technologies during a nine-month mission in low Earth orbit. The goal is to prove out the core systems needed to store, manage, and transfer super-cold liquid propellants in the weightless environment of space, a prerequisite for building the in-space propellant depots that deep space exploration increasingly depends on.

The mission addresses a problem that sounds almost mundane until you think about it seriously. Rockets run on cryogenic propellants, including liquid oxygen, that must be kept at extraordinarily low temperatures. On Earth, that is straightforward enough. In microgravity, it becomes considerably harder. Liquids behave differently without gravity to settle them, pressures shift, and propellant boils off faster than mission planners would like. None of these problems are unsolvable in isolation, but solving them together, reliably, in orbit, is another matter.

LOXSAT will work through the specific challenges systematically. According to NASA, the demonstration targets reducing boiloff, transferring propellant between tanks, maintaining tank pressure, and accurately gauging how much propellant remains on board. That last one, propellant gauging, is trickier in microgravity than it sounds. Without a reliable way to measure what you have left, planning a refueling architecture becomes an exercise in guesswork.

Eta Space built LOXSAT under NASA's Tipping Point program, which funds industry partners to develop space technologies that are close to commercially viable but need a push to get there. Rocket Lab is providing both the spacecraft and the ride: the LOXSAT payload has been integrated with a Rocket Lab Photon satellite bus and is scheduled to launch aboard the company's Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand no earlier than July 17.

The engineering team behind the mission spans three NASA centers. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama leads the effort, with contributions from Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The work falls under NASA's Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio Project, which sits within the Space Technology Mission Directorate and encompasses more than 20 individual technology development activities. LOXSAT is one of the more visible outputs of that portfolio, but it is part of a broader push to solve the plumbing problems of deep space travel before the plumbing actually needs to work on a crewed mission.

The strategic logic here is worth spelling out. Right now, every spacecraft that leaves Earth has to carry all the fuel it will ever need. That constraint shapes everything, from how heavy a vehicle can be to how far it can go to what payload fraction is left over for anything useful. In-space propellant depots would change the math considerably. A spacecraft could launch relatively light, rendezvous with a depot in orbit or at a waypoint between Earth and the Moon, refuel, and continue on. It is the same principle that makes transcontinental flight practical, just relocated to a far less forgiving environment.

Mars missions make this especially relevant. A crewed Mars mission that could top off its tanks at a lunar-orbit depot, or at a depot stationed at one of the Lagrange points, would have substantially more operational flexibility than one that has to carry every drop of propellant from the launchpad. The math gets more favorable with each refueling point added to the architecture.

None of that happens without the unglamorous groundwork LOXSAT is designed to provide. Nine months of data on how liquid oxygen behaves in microgravity, how well you can move it from tank to tank, how accurately you can measure it, and how effectively you can slow its boiloff will inform the design decisions for whatever comes next. Demonstration missions like this one rarely generate headlines proportional to their importance, but the technologies they validate have a way of quietly becoming foundational.

The launch window opens in mid-July, weather and technical readiness permitting, with data collection running through the duration of the mission. If things go as planned, the results will feed directly into the next phase of depot development, moving the concept from something engineers discuss in conference rooms to something they can actually build.

The sky, it turns out, is not as empty as it used to be, and scientists are starting to measure what that means for the atmosphere.

Researchers are raising new concerns about the chemical effects of surging space activity, focusing on two related problems: the pollution generated by rocket launches and the material released when satellites and other spacecraft burn up during re-entry. Both processes deposit particles and metals at altitudes where the atmosphere is thin, poorly understood, and potentially sensitive to interference. BBC Science Focus has described rocket emissions as an emerging source of ozone stress and framed space activity broadly as an atmospheric-policy issue that regulators have barely begun to address.

One of the more striking scientific arguments comes from Eloise Marais at University College London, who told NPR that satellite pollution is inadvertently generating useful data for geoengineering research. Because re-entering spacecraft inject human-made particles high into the atmosphere, scientists can observe how those materials behave in conditions that are otherwise hard to study. It is an accidental experiment, and not an entirely comfortable one.

The re-entry problem has a second dimension that has nothing to do with chemistry. As spacecraft are increasingly built from stronger, more heat-resistant materials, they are less likely to fully disintegrate on the way down. A research group at the University of Wisconsin-Stout told Infobae that materials innovation has transformed what was once considered a rare hazard into a more regular and persistent safety concern for populated areas and infrastructure. Pieces of spacecraft are surviving the fall.

Meanwhile, the sheer volume of objects in orbit keeps growing. Reports cited by the New York Post suggest roughly half of everything currently orbiting Earth is space junk, a figure the Post characterized as "uncontrollable." Low Earth orbit, the band running from about 300 to 2,000 kilometers up, is where most of this traffic moves at extraordinary speeds before eventually decaying or being deliberately disposed of. Researchers are also developing new tools to study the problem, including laser-based techniques for tracking how space debris contributes to atmospheric pollution.

The accumulation of these issues, atmospheric chemistry, ozone risk, debris survival, and sheer orbital crowding, suggests that space activity is quietly becoming an environmental policy question as much as an engineering one. The commercial launch boom has proceeded largely outside the frameworks that govern industrial pollution on the ground. That gap is becoming harder to ignore.

Original source: https://kite.kagi.com/5b73205d-fb42-4ee3-87ba-854f2545e029/science/3