Two giant swaths of radiation, known as the Van Allen Belts, surrounding Earth were discovered in 1958. In 2012, observations from the Van Allen Probes showed that a third belt can sometimes appear.

In 1958, James Van Allen discovered far fewer cosmic rays than expected using a cosmic-ray detector and suggested that a belt of strong radiation may have damaged the device. The belts were ...

Los Alamos, N.M., March 20, 2017--The inner Van Allen belt has less radiation than previously believed, according to a recent study in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The inner Van Allen belt has less radiation than previously believed, according to a recent study. Observations from NASA's Van Allen probes show the fastest, most energetic electrons in the inner ...

Specifically, the dense radiation environment of the Van Allen belts that surround our planet. When it launched Apollo missions through the Van Allen belts on a path to the Moon, NASA didn’t ...

To better study the Van Allen belts, NASA launched the Van Allen Probes (formerly known as the Radiation Belt Storm Probes) mission on 30 August 2012 to investigate both rings. It comprises two ...

The scientists originally assumed that the signal came from a distant object in the cosmos, but further analysis revealed ...

Our planet is nestled in the center of two immense, concentric doughnuts of powerful radiation: the Van Allen radiation belts, which harbor swarms of charged particles that are trapped by Earth ...

NASA's new Van Allen Probes have revealed how quickly the radiation belts around Earth change, and how charged particles there vary in time, energy and spatial distribution.

Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite (launched in 1958, three months after the U.S.S.R. launched Sputnik), found a big surprise in space: the Van Allen belts, rings of radiation that to this day are ...