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Mysteries of Earth's Radiation Belts Uncovered by NASA Twin Spacecraft
Dec. 4, 2013 — Just over a
year since launch, NASA's Van Allen Probes mission continues to unravel
longstanding mysteries of Earth's high-energy radiation belts that
encircle our planet and pose hazards to orbiting satellites and
astronauts.
Derived from measurements taken by a University of New Hampshire-led
instrument on board the twin spacecraft, the latest discovery reveals
that the high-energy particles populating the radiation belts can be
accelerated to nearly the speed of light in conjunction with ultra-low
frequency electromagnetic waves operating on a planetary scale.This mode of action, as detailed in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications,
is analogous to that of a cyclical particle accelerator like the Large
Hadron Collider. However, in this case, Earth's vast magnetic field, or
magnetosphere, which contains the Van Allen belts, revs up drifting
electrons to ever-higher speeds as they circle the planet from west to
east.The recent finding comes on the heels of a related discovery -- also
made by the UNH-led Energetic Particle, Composition, and Thermal Plasma
(ECT) instrument suite -- showing similar particle acceleration but on a
microscopic rather than a planetary scale."The acceleration we first reported operates on the scale size of an
electron's gyromotion -- it is a really local process, maybe only a few
hundred meters in size," notes Harlan Spence, director of the UNH
Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, principal scientist
for the ECT, and coauthor on the Nature Communications paper.
"Now we're seeing this large-scale, global motion involving ultra
low-frequency waves pulsing through Earth's magnetosphere and operating
across vast distances up to hundreds of thousands of kilometers." And,
Spence adds, in all likelihood both processes are occurring
simultaneously to accelerate particles to relativistic speeds.Understanding the complex dynamics of the particle acceleration will
help scientists make better predictions of space weather conditions and,
thus, offer better protections to orbiting satellites crucial to
modern-day society.Having twin spacecraft making simultaneous measurements in different
regions of nearby space is a key part of the mission as it allows the
scientists to look at data separated in both space and time."With the Van Allen Probes, I like to think there's no place for
these particles to hide because each spacecraft is spinning and
'glimpses' the entire sky with its detector 'eyes', so we're essentially
getting a 360-degree view in terms of direction, position, energy, and
time," Spence says.Adds Ian Mann of the University of Alberta and first author of the Nature Communications
paper, "People have considered that this acceleration process might be
present but we haven't been able to see it clearly until the Van Allen
Probes."What this provides is the ability to decipher actual changes in the
surrounding region rather than encountering something that looks
different but may simply be the result of a single-point measurement
with a limited perspective.With the discoveries, scientists are starting to unravel the
different pieces of the puzzle for any particular particle event that
changes the structure of the radiation belts. Ultimately they hope to be
able to understand the dynamics well enough to actually predict how,
collectively, all these different conditions working in tandem make the
belts either move in or out, inflate, deflate, change energy, or lose or
gain particles.Says Spence, "What we hope for are those serendipitous occasions when
nature has accentuated one process above all others, which allows the
spacecraft to really see what's going on. We want to know how the whole
system causes one phenomenon or process to dominate or have a lesser
influence compared to another one, and we're gaining a much deeper
understanding of that."
