Twin craft head for heart of Earth's magnetic storm

Lisa Grossman, reporter

(Image: NASA/Ben Smegelsky and Gary Thompson)

Cape Canaveral looks eerie at night - particularly when spotlights are dancing off the pre-dawn haze. These lights announced the launch of NASA's twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes, on their way to become the first spacecraft to directly study the bands of charged particles encircling the Earth.

Technical glitches and tropical storm Isaac delayed the launch by a full week, but the 4.05?am lift-off yesterday went without a hitch. The pair of heavily armoured spacecraft are headed directly into one of the most dangerous and mysterious regions of our cosmic neighbourhood: the Van Allen radiation belts. The belts, concentric rings of energetic charged particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field, were one of the first discoveries of the space age. But their variable size and shape has puzzled astronomers for decades.

The twin probes will fly into the heart of the storms, gathering data on the number of particles there, their energy levels, their composition and their direction in relation to Earth's magnetic field. They may help nail down whether, and how, the radiation belts respond to solar activity, and help make the journey out of Earth's cocooning magnetic field safer for future spacecraft.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/22f16015/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C0A80Cradiation0Ebelt0Eprobes0Elaunch0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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