A joint European-Chinese spacecraft is set to blast off Tuesday to investigate what happens when extreme winds and giant explosions of plasma shot out from the Sun slam into Earth's magnetic shield. Particularly fierce solar storms can knock out satellites, threaten astronauts – and create colorful auroras in the skies of northern and southern latitudes. To find out more about this little-understood space weather, the van-sized SMILE spacecraft is tasked with making the first-ever X-ray