With the flip of a switch, a pair of instruments designed and built by the University of Colorado Boulder and flying onboard twin NASA space probes have forced the revision of a 50-year-old theory about the structure of the ...
Space Exploration
Feb 28, 2013
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0
About 600 miles from Earth's surface is the first of two donut-shaped electron swarms, known as the Van Allen Belts, or the radiation belts. Understanding the shape and size of the belts, which can shrink and swell in response ...
Space Exploration
Jan 19, 2016
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1126
New research published in the journal Nature resolves decades of scientific controversy over the origin of the extremely energetic particles known as ultra-relativistic electrons in the Earth's near-space environment and ...
Space Exploration
Dec 18, 2013
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(Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has found some unusual spectral activity involving an otherwise "normal" pulsar; it displayed some absorption lines, which generally only occurs with bodies ...
Two tough, resilient, NASA spacecraft have been orbiting Earth for the past six and a half years, flying repeatedly through a hazardous zone of charged particles around our planet called the Van Allen radiation belts. The ...
Space Exploration
Feb 12, 2019
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460
(Phys.org) —Using data from NASA's Van Allen Probes, researchers have tested and improved a model to help forecast what's happening in the radiation environment of near-Earth space—a place seething with fast-moving particles ...
Space Exploration
Mar 8, 2014
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0
Our day-to-day lives exist in what physicists would call an electrically neutral environment. Desks, books, chairs and bodies don't generally carry electricity and they don't stick to magnets. But life on Earth is substantially ...
Space Exploration
Jul 17, 2012
2
0
Most satellites, not designed to withstand high levels of particle radiation, wouldn't last a day in the Van Allen Radiation belts. Trapped by Earth's magnetic field into two giant belts around the planet, high-energy particles ...
Space Exploration
Sep 4, 2017
0
25
(Phys.org) —Since the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts in in the Earth's upper atmosphere in 1958, space scientists have believed that these belts consisted of two doughnut-shaped rings of highly charged particles—an ...
Space Exploration
Jun 20, 2013
1
0
Correcting 50-year-old errors in the math used to understand how electromagnetic waves scatter electrons trapped in Earth's magnetic fields will lead to better protection for technology in space.
Space Exploration
Mar 4, 2024
0
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