Ionospheric Heaters and Destroying the Van Allen Belts
Hacking the Van Allen Belts
Could we save satellites and astronauts by wiping out the
Van Allen belts?
By Charles Q. Choi Posted 26 Feb 2014 | 15:00 GMT
Electric Light Orchestrated? Alas, even if we took control
of the Van Allen belts, it probably wouldn’t result in more auroras.
The radiation belts around Earth are loaded with dangerous
protons and electrons that can damage spacecraft. Now researchers are launching
experiments to see if they can clear away the high-energy
particles that pose the hazard by blasting them with radio waves.
When humans began exploring space, the first major find was
the Van Allen radiation belts, doughnut-shaped zones of magnetically trapped,
highly energetic charged particles. The Van Allen belts consist mainly of two
rings: The inner belt starts roughly 1000 kilometers above Earth’s surface and
extends up to 9600 km, while the outer belt stretches from about 13 500 to 58 000
km above Earth. The location and shapes of the belts can vary, and they can
even merge completely.
High-energy protons are found within the area of the inner
belt, whose size remains generally stable over the course of years to decades.
The outer belt, on the other hand, is home to high-energy electrons and can
vary dramatically in size and shape over the course of hours or days.
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The huge amounts of radiation in the Van Allen belts can
pose major risks for the host of satellites that pass through or orbit within
these swaths of space. There are ways to make spacecraft more resistant against
this radiation. For instance, spikes on their surfaces known as electron
emitters can radiate away excess lower-energy electrons that might otherwise
accumulate and cause a spark. In addition, shielding can help keep high-energy
protons and electrons from penetrating nonconducting materials and building up
inside them, which could lead to a damaging discharge.
However, decades of models and observations suggest a more
dramatic solution: using carefully tuned electromagnetic waves to drive these
particles out of space and into Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists first explored
the idea of dispersing electrons in the outer belt, and they are now targeting
protons in the inner belt.
“It’s really mind-boggling to think there could be human
control over such huge volumes of space,” says Jacob Bortnik, a
space physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “On Earth we
control nature all the time, like building dams, but the prospect of doing it
in space is fascinating—it seems a bit like science fiction.”
One radiation-clearing strategy involves using very
large radio transmitters on the ground to beam very low frequency (VLF) waves
upward. These can in principle interact with and scatter charges in the
radiation belt and drive them into the upper atmosphere.
“The result would be a little bit like auroras, although you
wouldn’t see them,” Bortnik says.
Fig. 1. Observation geometry and image data from two
low-light imaging systems capturing 557.7-nm emissions from a bull’s-eye-shaped
artificial ionospheric plasma over the HAARP facility. A reconstruction
based on the image data shows the central spot and the ring to form two
distinct artificial layers separated in altitude by ∼15
km, which matches closely the multiple layers seen in ionosonde echoes (lower
right).
The problem with that approach is getting VLF waves through
the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that sits about 80 to 640 km above
Earth. “That layer is very conductive, so it’s hard to get signals through it
efficiently,” Bortnik says.
Another strategy would station satellites that emit VLF
waves in the radiation belts. “The problem is that you’d need quite a lot of
energy,” Bortnik says, and large antennas that would be challenging to fit onto
spacecraft.
Still, Bortnik points out, the U.S. Air Force’s Demonstration and
Science Experiments (DSX) satellite, set for launch in 2016, will carry an
instrument to monitor the effects that VLF waves broadcast in space might have
on these dangerous electrons. “Those experiments can show how well VLF waves
actually do, and maybe change what we think we know about what is needed to
clear away electrons,” Bortnik says.
Satellite
Threat Due to High Altitude Nuclear Detonation – Eisenhower
Institute – Papadopoulos-Presentation 280369
Initial efforts to clear the Van Allen belts targeted
electrons because they tend to get trapped there as the result of high-altitude
nuclear explosions. In 1962, a U.S. high-altitude nuclear weapons test named Starfish
Prime generated a highly energetic artificial electron belt that disabled
the first commercial communications satellite, TelStar 1, so researchers sought
ways to protect spacecraft from nuclear weapons used in space.
However, it’s the protons in the inner belt that scientists
have recently explored. Getting rid of them would potentially open up valuable
new orbits for satellites and make travel safer for astronauts, says Maria de
Soria-Santacruz Pich, whose Ph.D. work at MIT was on manipulating the Van
Allen belts. It might also be impossible.
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“Protons are heavy, about 2000 times heavier than electrons,
so if you imagine a proton bashing into a piece of silicon, it can do a whole
lot more damage than an electron,” Bortnik says. “Clearing them out would be
good.”
High-Voltage Orbiting Long Tether
(HiVOLT):
A System for Remediation of the Van Allen Radiation Belts
Pich and her colleagues discovered that a type of VLF
electromagnetic wave known as an electromagnetic ion cyclotron
(EMIC) wave could potentially disperse protons in the inner belt. Pich says
this strategy poses no hazard to Earth—the
swarm of protons would be virtually unnoticed in the atmosphere.
Dr. Jacob Bortnik, UCLA “consultant to
QuakeFinder, based in Palo Alto, CA. QuakeFinder uses a chain of search-coil
magnetometers to look for possible magnetic precursors to large earthquakes, as
well as DEMETER satellite data.”
Pich and her colleagues recently refined
the computational strategy needed to figure out what frequencies
space-based antennas should use and how much power is needed. However, Pich
also found that to disperse all the protons from the region, you’d need a
million 15-meter antennas operating for a few years, “which is indeed not
feasible in
the near future,” she says.
Nonetheless, Pich noted, her calculations assume that the
waves these antennas generate do not bounce back and forth inside the inner
belt. If they do, that could greatly improve their effectiveness, potentially
making the strategy possible. A satellite mission would decide the matter one
way or another, but there’s a lot of engineering work needed to even propose
such a mission, she says.
It remains uncertain as to whether removing these radiation
belts might have unintended consequences.
“At present we don’t think there is any downside to not
having them, but as with all things geophysical, it is hard to know all the
complex interconnections between the various systems and estimate the full
effect of removing the radiation belts completely,” Bortnik says.
“That’s the most any of us can really say at the moment.”
This article originally appeared in print as “Can We Hack
the Van Allen Belts?.”
Mirrored from: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/hacking-the-van-allen-belts
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The military has been trying to destroy
or control our ionosphere, magnetosphere, and Van Allen Belts for over fifty
years and now it is getting crazy. I find it highly ironic that Dr.
Bortnik shoots electromagnetic missiles around our planet AND predicts
earthquakes due to heated skies….. RRRREALLY!?! I see what you did there,
chicken before the egg my butt. Read more about “radiation belt
remediation” and the whole story here on our HAARP and the Sky Heaters page]
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HAARP and the Sky
Heaters
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