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Spacecraft travelling beyond low Earth orbit enter the zone of radiation of the Van Allen belts. Beyond the belts, they face additional hazards from cosmic rays and solar particle events. A region between the inner and outer Van Allen belts lies at 2 to 4 Earth radii and is sometimes referred to as the "safe zone". [40] [41]
The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) is an area where Earth's inner Van Allen radiation belt comes closest to Earth's surface, dipping down to an altitude of 200 kilometres (120 mi). This leads to an increased flux of energetic particles in this region and exposes orbiting satellites (including the ISS) to higher-than-usual levels of ionizing ...
The Van Allen radiation belts swell and shrink over time as part of a much larger space weather system driven by energy and material that erupt off the Sun's surface and fill the entire Solar System. Space weather is the source of aurora that shimmer in the night sky, but it also can disrupt satellites, cause power grid failures and disrupt GPS ...
That’s well into the inner band of Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, which begin at around 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in altitude. ... The innermost of two bands that make up the Van Allen ...
SpaceX’s latest mission — a bold and risky trek into Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts by a four-person crew of civilians who will also aim to conduct the first commercial spacewalk — just ...
The plan included provisions for the development of scientific spacecraft to map Earth's Van Allen radiation belts. [2] Per decrees on 9 May 1960 and 13 May 1961, the satellites would consist of two identical pairs of spacecraft, the satellites of each pair in differing orbits to map the lower and upper Van Allen Belts simultaneously. [3]
These belts were also noticed independently by Van Allen after whom they are named. The American exploded a nuclear bomb, Starfish Prime, at 400 km above Johnston Island in 1962 and this disrupted the inner radiation belts for years. [4] It was thought for a while that the belts were man-made, creations of either country's secret weapons.
This mission observed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt (located in the inner region of Earth's magnetosphere), with the follow-up Explorer 3 later that year definitively proving its existence.