CGTN Europe spoke to Philippe Escoubet, European Space Agency SMILE Project Scientist.
Category
🎵
MusicTranscript
00:00Europe's space agency has been collaborating with China for over 25 years
00:05and now there's a project to collaborate on a rocket which will probe space weather.
00:12Philippe Escoubert is Project Scientist with the European Space Agency.
00:17Certainly we have started this collaboration with China since a very long time.
00:21In the cluster's time we started already to collaborate.
00:25At that time cluster was a European mission
00:29but Chinese got interested and we started to collaborate by exchange of students.
00:34Then a few years later the Chinese Academy of Science proposed a double star mission
00:40where we collaborate and they led the program.
00:43And now with mine it's about 50-50% on each of the missions.
00:48So 50% ISA, 50% CAS.
00:50For the future we have to see.
00:53Nothing is decided yet but certainly we have a long collaboration with China.
00:58What is the objective of this SMILE collaboration?
01:03SMILE is a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Science
01:09and we want to make the invisible visible.
01:13We want to study in particular the Sun-Earth relation and the solar storm.
01:18How the solar storm and the Sun which are big eruption of plasma
01:23sometime directed towards Earth and how do they interact with Earth.
01:28So what we look at is this big cloud when they arrive around the Earth
01:33they make a compression and a big change in the Earth's magnetic field.
01:38And with SMILE we will measure this interaction in x-ray.
01:43And this is the first time we do that in x-ray.
01:46It's like when you do a body scan in x-ray to see the bones in your body.
01:52We do the same with the metrosphere and we have this region of interaction
01:57between the Sun and the Earth appearing and being bright in x-ray.
02:02How does solar weather affect us here on Earth?
02:06And what are some of the questions that you are hoping to answer?
02:10I mean they can affect in various ways.
02:13The main thing which are a bit critical when we have this big aura and big currents
02:19flowing in the Earth's magnetic field, this could affect power lines.
02:24Big power lines that give current to many countries
02:28where they can be affected by this current in the metrosphere
02:32and sometimes they can be disrupted.
02:34You can have also effect on GPS satellites which may be less precise
02:39because of this Sun-Earth interaction.
02:42And there are various also other effects that space weather is trying to study.
02:46SMALI is not a space weather mission but we study the science which is behind space weather
02:51to better understand space weather.