Van Allen Belts

NASA is launching a suborbital sounding rocket to study how radio waves escaping the Earth's ionosphere may be affecting orbital satellites by interacting with the Van Allen Belts.

NASA has shut down the first of the two Van Allen Probes in anticipation of their controlled burn up in the Earth's atmosphere in about 15 years. On July 19, 2019, at 1:27 pm EDT, mission control sent the signal ordering Van Allen Probe B to close down its systems after running out of propellant.

The Van Allen Probes have been set on a trajectory that will plunge the radiation belt satellites into the Earth's atmosphere. In order to keep the pair of spacecraft from becoming a hazard to navigation, a series of thruster maneuvers will place them in ever-tightening orbits ending around 2034.

​On this day 60 years ago, America became the second country to send a human-made object into low-Earth orbit, with the successful launch of its first satellite – Explorer 1.

Scientists have, for the first time, recreated a key property of outer space here on Earth. Using a special type of particle accelerator, the international team has developed a way to generate the same type of space radiation that poses a threat to astronauts and spacecraft..

Back in 2013, two NASA probes were in the perfect position to observe a solar wave as it hit Earth’s magnetic field, gathering data on the event. That data has now been analyzed by teams of scientists, revealing the process by which high-speed particles are generated in Earth’s radiation belts.

The idea of putting a Star Trek-like force field around the entire Earth seems like the fodder for a fairly silly science fiction epic out of the 1930s, but according to space scientists, such a barrier already exists.