This is to announce that SMILE (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) has been proposed in response to the ESA-CAS call for joint missions by European and Chinese institutions. We are writing also to ask for your support for SMILE, which you can express by visiting the SMILE Website at http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/SMILE, clicking on JOIN (top right corner), entering name, affiliation and e-mail address and clicking on the grey button underneath.
                                
SMILE will measure the Earth's global system responses to solar wind and geomagnetic variations. SMILE will enable us for the first time to trace and link the processes of solar wind injection in the magnetosphere with those acting on the charged particles precipitating into the cusps and eventually the aurora.

SMILE will do this in a unique manner, never attempted before: it will combine soft X-ray imaging of the Earth's magnetopause and magnetospheric cusps with simultaneous UV imaging of the Northern aurora. SMILE will also carry in-situ instrumentation (an ion analyser and a magnetometer) to monitor the solar wind conditions, so that the simultaneous X-ray and UV images can be compared and contrasted directly, and self-sufficiently, with the upstream driving conditions.

With its unparallelled payload SMILE will provide answers to many of the open questions in solar-terrestrial relationships in a thoroughly novel way.

Thank you for your attention and support,

Co-PIs: Graziella Branduardi-Raymont, University College London-MSSL & Chi Wang, National Space Science Center, Beijing

and the SMILE collaboration, including Steve Sembay (Leicester University),  Jonathan Eastwood (Imperial College), Eric Donovan (University of Calgary), David Sibeck (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Palmroth (Finnish Meteorological Institute).