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VIDEO SPLOID PALEOFUTURE IO9 SCIENCE REVIEW FIELD GUIDE DESIGN
Van Allen Belt Mystery Solved With Student-Built
Satellite VIDEO SPLOID PALEOFUTURE IO9 SCIENCE REVIEW FIELD GUIDE DESIGN
Ryan F. Mandelbaum
12/13/17 1:12pm • 57.5K 30 9

Image: NASA/Van Allen Probes/Goddard Space Flight Center

Oh, that Van Allen Belt—online crackpots love to use Earth’s belt of radiation
to bolster their Moon landing conspiracies, suggesting it could be too strong
for an astronaut to travel through (not true). But the truth is, scientists do
think about the Van Allen Belt and its mysteries. They’ve launched probes to
study the region since they weren’t sure where some of that radiation came
from.

The belt consists of charged particles like protons and electrons trapped by
Earth’s magnetic field between 300 miles and 25,000 miles above the Earth’s
surface. It helps protect the planet from dangerous space weather. Scientists
have long known the source of the positively-charged protons—they’re the
product of cosmic rays colliding with particles in Earth’s atmosphere—but
they were unsure if the same source supplied the negatively-charged
electrons. A student-built satellite may have answered that question.

The satellite, called the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment, was built
by a team of graduates and undergraduates at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. The ten-pound, burrito-sized satellite has a proton- and electron-
detecting device on board that can measure the directions and density of the
particles traveling through it.

Astronomers figured out that “cosmic-ray albedo neutron decay,” or CRAND,

was the proton source quickly after the belt’s discovery. Cosmic rays hit the
Earth’s upper atmosphere and collide with neutral atoms. These atoms release
neutrons, which in turn go through a radioactive decay process that turns
them into protons, called beta decay. Beta decay also makes neutrons spit out
lower-energy electrons, but scientists were never quite sure if this process was
responsible for the electrons in the Van Allen belt, specifically. Electron
measurements of the inner Van Allen Belt have varied widely even though the
neutrons should decay at a constant rate, according to the paper published
today in Nature.

Analysis of the data (available here) revealed that the electron measurements
looked just like the trapped particles came from that CRAND process. This
would be the “first direct detection of these energetic electrons near the inner
edge of Earth’s radiation,” according to a press release citing Xinlin Li of CU
Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

Essentially, the scientists confirmed their hunch that CRAND is the source of
the Van Allen belt’s electrons.

The paper’s authors do put forward some other interpretations of their data—
perhaps some experimental error led them to their conclusion, for example.
But their observations “seems to be consistent only with CRAND.”

One researcher not involved in the study, Diego Cassadei from the University
of Applied Sciences and Arts of Northwestern Switzerland, told Gizmodo that
“this shows that, when well designed, even a relatively cheap experiment can
produce valuable data.” He would have liked to see more data on the directions
the electrons came from. Nor did think the overall story was so new. He
pointed out that the Earth’s magnetosphere and radiation belts are simple
overall, but can be quite complicated when looking at the details. “This is what
the authors have done, and they have all my respect for the amount of good
data analysis work they have published.”

All of this just goes to show what a team of students can do with a pretty cheap
satellite—and some National Science Foundation funding.

[Nature]

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Science writer at Gizmodo | I like physics and eating

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