Birth of a Radiation Belt

At 03:42 Greenwich time on March 24, 1991, the population of high-energy electrons and protons trapped in the Earth's magnetic field suddenly received huge reinforcements. The new belt was so intense that it knocked out (within a few days) the MARECS-1 communication satellite, and NOAA's weather satellite GOES-7 was also seriously degraded.

This solar wind fills the entire solar system, well beyond the outermost planets, but it does not reach the Earth, because we are shielded by our planet's magnetic field. Instead it flows around the magnetic obstacle, the way a creek will flow around a rock in its path. A shielded cavity is formed, the "magnetosphere" surrounding the Earth; the closest the solar wind penetrates towards the Earth is about 10-11 RE (Earth radii), or some 40,000 miles, on the side of the cavity facing the Sun.

Besides expanding clouds, the Sun's outbursts also create great numbers of fast ions, enough to fill the inner solar system, each with an energy that can reach several million times that of solar wind particles; such particles behave very much like intense nuclear radiation, and are a danger to the lives of any astronauts who happen to be on their way to the moon or to Mars, outside the shield of the Earth's magnetosphere. Intense X-rays and radio waves are also emitted, coming from high energy electrons which did not manage to escape the Sun.

Until recently such radiation was credited to solar flares, bright spots that suddenly appeared in the Sun's high atmosphere near sunspots, supposedly signifying energy release in the corona. But in 1973 astronauts aboard the Skylab space station saw something new: huge bubbles of hot gas, expanding upwards much faster than the solar wind, fast enough to push shock waves ahead of them into interplanetary space. Such "coronal mass ejections" (CMEs) seemed closely related to the interplanetary shocks which now and then strike the magnetosphere. Each year a few such shocks are strong enough to push the magnetosphere's boundary past the synchronous orbit, at 6.6 RE, where communication satellites generally dwell. Recent opinion has been that CMEs, rather than flares, are more likely to be signs of sudden solar energy releases that affect the Earth.

The research spacecraft CRRES, operated by the US Air Force with NASA participation, was at that instant deep inside the radiation belt, at a distance of 2.55 RE. CRRES (pronounced "cress") stands for Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite, reflecting the spacecraft's multiple duties--to probe the radiation belt, as well as to release clouds of barium and lithium vapor, tracing motions of the magnetosphere the same way as a plume of smoke traces the motion of wind. CRRES was also a testbed for a variety of electronics circuits, to help engineers design electronics and microcomputers to perform reliably in space, even in the heart of the radiation belt.

The first thing CRRES saw was a torrent of highly energetic protons and electrons. The protons had energies above 20 Mev, twenty million electron volts, some 20,000 times the energy of the average proton in the solar wind. The electrons had about 15 Mev, and the energy of either type was quite sufficient to penetrate a spaceship and cause damage. In the concluding words of a scientific study of this event, "it is fortunate that present-day space missions do not spend much time in this region of the Earth's magnetosphere." On that particular day and for a long time afterwards, that region was indeed a hot place to be in.

Yet we have abundant evidence that ions and electrons in space are indeed accelerated to high energies, all over the universe: in flares and CMEs near the Sun, in elusive "substorms" of the magnetosphere, in the radiation belts of Jupiter and other magnetized planets and in the unknown sources of cosmic radiation, the perpetual drizzle of extremely energetic ions which bombards the Earth. On March 24, 1991, it happened right in front of our eyes, as if by a conjuring trick. But how?

Some evidence came from the particles themselves. Energetic ions and electrons trapped by the Earth's magnetic field drift around the equator--positive protons clockwise (viewed from north), negative electrons counter-clockwise. The sudden burst of electrons intercepted by CRRES quickly ebbed again, suggesting it was caused by a compact cloud of electrons which soon drifted away.

Dr. Xinlin Li of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and his colleagues--Mary Hudson at Dartmouth, Ilan Roth, John Wygant and Mike Temerin at Berkeley, and Bernie Blake at the Aerospace Corporation--used a computer to model the path of the shock wave and to reconstruct the way it affected electrons already present in the magnetosphere. They selected a wide range of initial positions and energies, then calculated the tracks of more than 300,000 electrons, examining how each of them fared when the wave passed over it. The result resembled in many ways the way a surfer rides a wave. Electrons starting with unfavorable positions or energies gained little energy or even lost some; however a few lucky ones matched the speed of the advancing wave, rode the crest deep into the magnetosphere and gained much energy in the process. In their computer simulation Dr. Li and his colleagues managed to reproduce quite convincingly the initial pulse and two of the periodic "drift echoes."

Did this explain the way ions and electrons are accelerated in nature? Not completely, because the favored electrons already needed a hefty amount of energy to start with, close to 2 Mev. The abundant low-energy electrons in the magnetosphere gained very little energy: like pieces of driftwood bobbing in the surf, as the shock passed them their energy rose briefly and then went down again. Electrons of around 2 Mev indeed exist in the magnetosphere, and they seem to be the ones from which the new radiation was formed. But their origin has always been something of a mystery: some scientists have even speculated that they may have escaped from the intense radiation belt of the distant planet Jupiter.