Earth's Radiation Belt w/ Safe Zone

  • Credit

    NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Earth's Radiation Belts Tremble Under Impact of Solar Storm

Plasmapause Convects to the Magnetopause During Halloween Solar Storm

Earth's Radiation Belts with Safe Zone Orbit

Under the wave of energetic particles from the Halloween 2003 solar storm events, the Earth's radiation belts underwent significant changes in structure. This visualization is constructed using daily-averaged particle flux data from the SAMPEX satellite installed in a simple dipole model for the Earth's magnetic field. The toroidal structure of the belts corresponds to regions with electron fluxes in excess of 100 electrons/s/cm^2/steradian with energies of 2-6 MeV. The color-scale on the cross section is violet for low flux and white for high flux. The translucent grey arcs represent the fields lines of the Earth's dipole field. The 3-dimensional structure was built from the SAMPEX measurement by propagating the particle flux values along field lines of a simple magnetic dipole.

The plasmasphere is a region of ionospheric plasma which co-rotates with the Earth, carried by the magnetic field lines. The plasmapause marks the outer boundary of this region. This colder plasma is more easily moved by the electric fields created by strong solar storms. In the Halloween 2003 event, these fields convected some of the cold plasma out to the magnetopause (grey, semi-transparent surface) and reduced the size of the cold plasma region near the Earth. For this visualization, the 3-dimensional structure was constructed from the equatorial profile of the plasmapause (as measured by IMAGE/EUV data) by extending the region along field lines of a simple dipole field.

Spacecraft orbiting in the 'Safe Zone', between two and three Earth radii, can be subjected to high levels of harmful radiation as the radiation belts fluctuate in response to space weather events.

This movie displays the changing radiation belts from the solar storm as well as a satellite orbit (red) in the 'Safe Zone'.

Metadata

  • Sensor

    SAMPEX/PET

  • Animation ID

    3052

  • Video ID

    None

  • Start Timecode

    00:00:00:00

  • End Timecode

    00:00:00:00

  • Animator

    Tom Bridgman, James W. Williams, Greg Shirah

  • Studio

    SVS

  • Visualization Date

    2004/12/01

  • Scientist

    Daniel Baker (LASP), Shrikanth Kanekal (NOAA)

  • Keywords

    Geomagnetic Field, Radiation Belts

  • DLESE Subject

    Space science

  • Data Date

    2003/10/17 - 2003/12/25

  • Pao ID

    G04-071

  • Animation Type

    Regular