The groundbreaking SMILE satellite launched on May 19th and RAZOR's Neil Cairns talks the co-principal investigator, Dr Colin Forsyth, at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Nestled in the Surrey countryside, MSSL is a world leader in space research. Dr Forsyth explains the mission's remarkable ambition: to observe the boundary at which Earth's magnetosphere deflects the charged particles of the solar wind, a natural shield that protects all life on our planet.

SMILE is a rare joint mission between the European Space Agency and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The workload was split 50-50 with China providing the spacecraft bus - the fuel tanks, the solar panels, and the main body of the spacecraft. Europe is providing the payload platform - the module which all of the instrument's plug into, and that interfaces with the spacecraft.

The Soft X-ray Imager, or SXI is the most significant of four instruments carried on board. Neil travels to Leicester Space Park at the University of Leicester - where the SXI was designed and built - to hear from its co-principal investigator, Dr Jenny Carter.

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