Birmingham researchers share £4m funding to unlock the secrets of Earth's radiation belts - crucial for protecting satellites and forecasting space weather.
Simulation of the Earth's radiation belts. Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the five-year project will combine extensive spacecraft data from international missions with advanced computer modelling.
The team, led by researchers from Northumbria University, in partnership with the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick, will determine what controls energy transfer through Earth's magnetosphere – the magnetic shield around our planet – and into the radiation belts.
Radiation belts are areas of space surrounding the Earth where the planet's magnetic field captures and holds fast-moving particles. In these harsh environments, some particles reach nearly the speed of light.
The intensity and size of these belts can change dramatically over just hours or days in response to disturbances from the Sun. However, scientists currently cannot predict their behaviour – whether they will intensify or weaken, expand or shrink.
The research has been funded with a prestigious Large Award from the STFC. These awards aim to tackle big scientific questions that have the potential to produce world-leading research, with Birmingham receiving £895,000 of the total funding.
Dr Oliver Allanson, Assistant Professor in Space Environment said, "It is an eternal wonder that microscale interactions of subatomic particles that occur in one thousandth of a second can determine the global evolution of the near-Earth radiation environment over hundreds of thousands of kilometres, and with it the fate of key space assets."
The research will address two key questions: what controls how much energy from the solar wind reaches the radiation belts, and whether small changes in conditions can lead to dramatically different outcomes.
"It is an eternal wonder that microscale interactions of subatomic particles that occur in one thousandth of a second can determine the global evolution of the near-Earth radiation environment over hundreds of thousands of kilometres, and with it the fate of key space assets."
Understanding Earth's radiation belt environment is crucial for protecting satellites operating in these regions, which provide essential services including GPS navigation, telecommunications, and weather forecasting.
Principal Investigator, Professor Clare Watt, Professor of Space Physics at Northumbria University, said, "Despite decades of research and sophisticated NASA missions that have sampled these harsh environments directly, the radiation belts have remained frustratingly unpredictable. This project will help us understand whether that's because we don't fully grasp the physics involved, or because parts of the system are inherently chaotic and sensitive to tiny changes in conditions."
The project will produce recommendations for improving forecasting accuracy, including where to incorporate real-time data into models and how to use ensemble modelling to provide probabilistic forecasts effectively.
Assistant Professor
Profile of Dr Oliver Allanson, Department of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Birmingham
