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By Brian Tristam Williams
Teledyne Space Imaging has supplied two CCD370 imaging sensors for the Soft X-ray Imager on ESA’s SMILE mission, which has launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
The company announced that the sensors are part of the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer, a European-Chinese scientific mission designed to study the interaction between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic environment.
The Teledyne CCD370 sensors sit at the heart of SMILE’s Soft X-ray Imager. The device is intended to capture soft X-ray emissions generated when solar wind particles interact with Earth’s magnetic field. The sensors will observe photons with energies from 0.2 keV to 2.0 keV, allowing scientists to study the boundary regions where the solar wind meets the magnetosphere.
SMILE launched on a Vega-C rocket at 04:52 BST on 19 May 2026. The mission will use four science instruments to study how Earth responds to solar wind, with the aim of improving understanding of solar storms, geomagnetic storms and space weather.
Space weather is not just a science concern. Disturbances driven by solar activity can affect satellites, radio links, navigation systems and power infrastructure. As previously reported in our eeNews Europe article, Solar storm hits GNSS systems, geomagnetic activity can have practical consequences for technology services on Earth.
The Soft X-ray Imager is expected to give researchers a new way to observe large-scale structures in the magnetosphere, rather than relying only on localised measurements from spacecraft passing through those regions. That should support better models of how energy and particles from the Sun couple into near-Earth space.
Teledyne said design, manufacturing, test and qualification of the CCD detectors were carried out at Teledyne Space Imaging’s facility in Chelmsford, England. The company describes the business as a supplier of space-qualified imaging sensors, focal plane arrays and integrated camera systems, with heritage across more than 250 space projects.
ESA’s SMILE factsheet says the spacecraft’s orbit will take it as far as 121,000 km from Earth above the North Pole, and down to about 5,000 km above the South Pole for data return. The mission is a joint effort between ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with the payload module and Soft X-ray Imager developed and procured through ESA.
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