NASA Renames Radiation Belt Mission to Honour Pioneering Scientist
NASA has renamed a recently launched mission that studies Earth's radiation belts as the Van Allen Probes in honour of the late James Van Allen. Van Allen was the head of the physics department at the University of Iowa who discovered the radiation belts encircling Earth in 1958. The new name of the mission, previously called the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP), was announced Friday during a ceremony at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. Read more
Sounds of Space: New 'Chorus' Recording By RBSP's EMFISIS Instrument
Researchers from the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) team at the University of Iowa have released a new recording of an intriguing and well-known phenomenon known as chorus, made on Sept. 5, 2012. The Waves tri-axial search coil magnetometer and receiver of EMFISIS captured several notable peak radio wave events in the magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth. The radio waves, which are at frequencies that are audible to the human ear, are emitted by the energetic particles in the Earths magnetosphere. Read more
Radiation Belt Storm Probe Mission Post-Launch News Conference
Spoiler
Following the successful launch of an Atlas V rocket and the separation of the twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes, Richard Fitzgerald, RBSP Project Manager, Michael Luther, Deputy Associate Administrator Science Mission Directorate and Nicky Fox, RBSP Deputy Project Scientist, spoke briefly to the assembled media.
NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP), the first twin-spacecraft mission designed to explore our planet's radiation belts, launched into the predawn skies at 08:05 UT Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. Read more
NASA's Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP), the first twin-spacecraft mission designed to explore our planet's radiation belts, launched into the predawn skies at 08:05 UT Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. The two satellites, each weighing just less than 1,500 pounds, comprise the first dual-spacecraft mission specifically created to investigate this hazardous regions of near-Earth space, known as the radiation belts.