Auroras swirling above the North Pole are a gorgeous sight from Earth’s surface—and from space.
A satellite named Smile has captured an auroral substorm raging above the North Pole. The footage represents the first images released from the mission’s ultraviolet (UV) camera. The satellite was launched into a highly elliptical orbit above Earth in May and is a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences to study solar and geomagnetic storms and space weather.
The images show the somewhat hurricanelike swirl of UV light during the auroral substorm over the North Pole. This kind of storm is caused by solar wind interacting with Earth’s magnetic field.
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Taken on July 24, during a particularly large influx of solar particles into the atmosphere, the observations reveal the full extent of the northern lights in UV light.
Storms like this are best viewed in the ultraviolet range because there’s no interference from daytime sunlight. Smile will be recording auroras for 45 hours at a time, according to the ESA.
One of the two first images to be released from the soft x-ray imager (SXI) on the European-Chinese Smile mission shows the aftermath of an exploded star. With SXI, Smile is becoming the first spacecraft to make detailed, long-running x-ray observations of Earth’s magnetic field.
Smile’s x-ray camera also captured the bright remnants of a distant exploding star—but in the future, it, too, will be pointed at Earth in order to better understand our planet’s place in space.
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