NASA’s radiation belt discovery will rewrite the textbooks on Space Weather

Scientists have known about the two Van Allen radiation belts since the 1950s, however two new satellites that were launched back in August to study the belts have found that sometimes the duo splits into a trio.

The twin Van Allen Probes (formerly called the Radiation Belt Storm Probes) have been taking measurements of the radiation belts since September 1st, 2012, when they settled into highly elliptical orbits around the Earth that take them in and out of the belts on a regular basis.

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Shortly after that, an increase in solar activity caused the outer radiation belt to swell and the scientists watched in amazement as the outer belt split into two, forming a new three-ring configuration that lasted for four weeks. The entire event was captured by the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT), which the scientists had fortunately turned on early, in order to overlap observations with another mission (SAMPEX — Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer) which was soon going to de-orbit and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

"By the fifth day REPT was on, we could plot out our observations and watch the formation of a third radiation belt," said Shri Kanekal, the deputy mission scientist for the Van Allen Probes at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We started wondering if there was something wrong with our instruments. We checked everything, but there was nothing wrong with them. The third belt persisted beautifully, day after day, week after week, for four weeks."

At the end of that four-week period, another blast from the solar wind stripped away the outer ring and the belts settled back into their familiar two-ring arrangement.

The incredibly good timing of the mission scientists is having another unexpected consequence — it completely changes the standing model we've had for the Van Allen belts, which will force a rewrite of science textbooks to include this new information.

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"I consider ourselves very fortunate," says Daniel Baker, the principal investigator for REPT at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "By turning on our instruments when we did, taking great pride in our engineers and having confidence that the instruments would work immediately and having the cooperation of the sun to drive the system the way it did — it was an extraordinary opportunity. It validates the importance of this mission and how important it is to revisit the Van Allen Belts with new eyes."

Baker, Kanekal and their colleagues have had their findings published in the journal Science on February 28th, in a paper titled: A Long-Lived Relativistic Electron Storage Ring Embedded in Earth's Outer Van Allen Belt.

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