The Van Allen belts aren't a problem just for space exploration. They can damage satellites, too, and we're putting up a lot of satellites these days.

Even if the innermost belt is at its closest, the ISS (and the space shuttle in its day) are more than 100 miles away from the Van Allen Belts. For near-Earth missions, the Van Allen belts are not ...

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.

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But on the day of the March 2015 geomagnetic storm, one of the Van Allen Probes was orbiting right through the belts, providing unprecedentedly high-resolution data from a rarely witnessed phenomenon.

Mystery Belt. Back in 2013, NASA sent two Van Allen Probes into the Van Allen radiation belts in order to gather more information on the phenomena and on the Earth's magnetosphere.

However, in 2013, NASA’s Van Allen Probes reported an unexplained third Van Allen belt that had not previously been observed. This third Van Allen belt lasted only a few weeks before it vanished ...

On the left is the usual structure of the two rings forming the Van Allen belt, while on the right the temporary third "storage ring" is seen, nestling between the other two rings. (Courtesy: ...

The Van Allen Probes recently found a third belt of charged particles circling Earth, which was then destroyed by a solar shock wave. John Matson reports Back in 1958, at the dawn of the space age ...

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 ...