Speaker
Description
The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) dedicated to studying the interaction between the solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere. Beyond its scientific objectives, SMILE represents an important historic milestone for the ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC): it is the first ESA science mission whose data were successfully received, processed and archived within hours of launch, demonstrating archive readiness from the earliest phases of mission operations.
This achievement was enabled by the close collaboration between the ESA Science Operations Centre (SOC), archive teams, and mission stakeholders throughout development, testing, and operational preparation. Interfaces, data flows, and archive services were validated before launch, allowing the archive to support the mission from its very first day.
SMILE data are managed through the ESDC Multi-Mission Data Services (EMDS) framework and made available through the HelioPhysics Archive (HPA), ESA's common access point for heliophysics missions. These archive services operate within the broader SMILE ground segment, supporting the flow of scientific data between the Chinese ground segment, the ESA Science Operations Centre (SOC), instrument teams across Europe, and the scientific community, while providing interoperable data access, visualization, and long-term preservation capabilities.
This presentation describes the SMILE mission and archive architecture within a distributed ground segment involving ESA, CAS, and instrument teams across Europe. It presents the challenges and lessons learned and highlights the role of SMILE in the evolution of ESA's heliophysics data ecosystem.