On 9 December 2024, the Smile Platform arrived safely at Amsterdam Schiphol airport and was subsequently transported to ESA's European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. It came a long way, having travelled all the way from Shanghai, China.
This marks an important step in the Smile mission, as the spacecraft's two halves are now in the same location, ready to be joined together. Launching in around a year from now, Smile will study space weather and the interaction between the solar wind and Earth’s environment.
The Platform, built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), includes the propulsion and service modules responsible for powering, steering and controlling the spacecraft. The European half of the spacecraft – the so-called Payload Module – was built by Airbus in Madrid and is already at ESTEC. It hosts three of the four science instruments of the mission, commands all four of them and downlinks all the data back to Earth.
The Platform didn't travel alone. It was accompanied by a team of Smile engineers and managers from CAS. They will closely work together with their European counterparts from ESA and Airbus during the coming ten months to assemble the Smile spacecraft and fully test it at ESA's ESTEC Test Centre.
After that, Smile will be shipped to Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Its launch is planned for late 2025.
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