REAL LIFE NEWS: HEADING FOR THE VAN ALLEN BELTS
by Hazed
When I was a teenager, and had only just discovered the joys of science fiction books, one of the novels that thrilled me was the tale of an astronaut who voyages beyond the confounds of the Earth. When his ship passed the Van Allen belts - radiation bands around our planet - suddenly his ship’s radio was filled with the sound of the universe, which was so terrible it sent him mad!
(I can’t remember the name of the book but it might have been by author Hugh Walters...)
While the idea of alien radio sending you insane is absolute tosh, the Van Allen belts are real, and NASA has just launched a pair of probes to go and take a closer look. The Radiation Belt Storm Probes blasted off from Cape Canaveral a few days into Earth orbit, and after a couple of months of system checks will start to collect data and beam it back to scientists.
James Van Allen discovered the radiation belts around the Earth in 1958. They have plasma fields trapped inside them, and the number of particles in the outer belt varies a lot - sometimes it swells enough to affect communications satellites and research instruments in orbit around the planet.
The probes’ data should allow scientists to understand what makes the plasma move in and out of the belts as well as throwing light on space weather and solar flares.
Here’s a great picture showing the two probes launching from Cape Canavera on a Delta rocket.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/30/radiation_belt_storm_probes_launched/
