Space Weather, Auroras, Solar Flares and CMEs

[Parsons]

Haha.. I wish I knew more. Your article caused me to research what the radiation belt is.

From what I've gathered, its (2) strong areas of radiation around earth. This is caused by energy particles getting caught in our electromagnetic field.

The Van Allen radiation belt is a torus of energetic charged particles (plasma) around Earth, which is held in place by Earth's magnetic field. It is believed that most of the particles that form the belts come from solar wind, and other particles by cosmic rays.

It has been confirmed that this field contains anti-particles. It sort of makes me want to speculate this radiation could be shielding the Earth from a significant amount of these.

In 2011, a study has confirmed earlier speculation that the Van Allen belt could confine antiparticles. The PAMELA experiment detected orders of magnitude higher levels of antiprotons than are expected from normal particle decays while passing through the SAA. This suggests the van Allen belts confine a significant flux of antiprotons produced by the interaction of the Earth's upper atmosphere with cosmic rays.[16] The energy of the antiprotons has been measured in the range from 60 - 750 MeV.

It may be of note that they are apparently trying to develop technology to be able to manually drain these belts for more convenient/safe space travel of unmanned/manned craft. I do not know enough about this to know if its good or bad.

The Russian physicist V.V. Danilov proposed the use of a High Voltage Orbiting Long Tether as a potential means to drain the radiation belt of high energy particles. The proposal involves deploying highly electrically charged tethers from satellites in orbit. Charged particles within the radiation belt encountering these tethers would be deflected by their large electrostatic fields onto paths that intersect with the atmosphere, where they would be harmlessly dissipated. Simulations have suggested that the inner belt could be drained to 1% of its natural electron flux within two months of HiVOLT operation.