This is the first footage to be released from the ultraviolet camera (UVI) on the European-Chinese Smile mission. With UVI, Smile is now the first spacecraft since 2008 to capture the full ring of northern lights around the north pole in ultraviolet light, and is doing so for a record-breaking 45 hours at a time.
The video covers 00:00–00:58 Universal Time (UT) on 24 July 2026, when Smile was undergoing its in-space commissioning. The way the ring of light ripples shows that there has been a substorm in Earth’s magnetosphere.
Substorms are brief disturbances in Earth’s magnetosphere that are created when the wind of charged particles from the Sun squashes Earth’s magnetic field lines, forcing them to pinch together and sending a burst of energetic particles shooting towards the north and south poles. This can light up the sky with the northern and southern lights.
Even big substorms are not too unusual, with about 300 expected in the three years that Smile is expected to operate, though they are currently more common than normal, as the Sun is at the most active point in its 11-year cycle.
The dots on the left side of the video are distant stars emitting ultraviolet light.
More information about Smile’s in-space commissioning and preparations for science
[Image description: A square blue image, with a little over half of Earth taking up most of the image. Earth looks like how we see the Moon when it is waxing or waning at just over a half-Moon. Because this is an ultraviolet image, Earth does not appear in its usual colours, but is light blue with a white ring. This ring is about a third of the size of the face of Earth that we see, and is quite swirly, like clouds or dye being mixed with water. The background of the image is dark blue, with some tiny white dots: these are stars. The stars are moving downwards, giving the impression that the satellite taking the footage is moving. Text at the top left says ‘Smile UVI / 2026-07-24T00:00:00 UT’ with the timestamp increasing from 00:00:00 to 00:59:08 throughout the GIF.]