The Special Issue on Modeling and Data Analysis Methods for the SMILE mission

The SMILE (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) mission (http://www.nssc.cas.cn/smile/) is a scientific space mission, jointly supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). SMILE aims to study the solar wind-magnetosphere coupling in a novel approach: global imaging of the Earth’s magnetosheath and cusps in the soft X-ray band. At the same time, it also provides UV imaging of the northern auroral regions, completing the detection of solar wind–magnetosphere–ionosphere coupling in a global way. The time frame for launch is in 2025. This talk summarizes the recent progress of SMILE Modeling Working Group (MWG), specifically a special issue on Earth and Planetary Physics (EPP) with 23 articles to provide the international space science community with works regarding the modeling and data analysis methods developed during the pre-studies of the SMILE mission. We categorize the articles into the following topics and give some brief comments: (1) instrument descriptions of the Soft X-ray Imager (SXI), (2) modeling of the X-ray signals, (3) data processing of the images, (4) tracing the boundary locations from the simulated images, (5) physical phenomenon related to the scientific goals of SMILE-SXI, (6) modeling of the aurora, and (7) ground-based support for SMILE.