Space weather research: Earth's radiation belts

Structure and Dynamics of the Electron Radiation Belts: Implications for Space Weather Modeling and Forecasting

DREAM: An integrated space radiation nowcast system for natural and nuclear radiation belts

The natural space environment continues to surprise us. We recently witnessed the quietest solar minimum in the past 100 years, casting huge uncertainties on our expectations for approach to Solar Maximum. The overall space environment is made up of many related but independent parts. The Dynamic Radiation Environment Assimilation Model (DREAM) focuses on the spacecraft charging environment. DR...

Earths: Rare in Time, Not Space?

We compare two recent astrobiological approaches to the solution of the problem of the “Great Silence” (or Fermi’s paradox): the “rare Earth” hypothesis of Ward and Brownlee, and the phase-transition scenario of Annis. We show that they have important similarities, as far as self-selection of intelligent observers is concerned. In order to better illuminate the differences, we consider the dura...

Jupiter's Radiation Belts: Can Pioneer 10 Survive?

Model calculations of Jupiter's electron and proton radiation belts indicate that the Galilean satellites can reduce particle fluxes in certain regions of the inner magnetosphere by as much as six orders of magnitude. Average fluxes should be reduced by a factor of 100 or more along the Pioneer 10 trajectory through the heart of Jupiter's radiation belts in early December. This may be enough to...

Research Environment and Information Service of the Space Weather Cloud

For researches and information services of space weather, it is important to establish a comprehensive system which enables us to analyze observation and simulation data in an integrated manner. For this, we constructed recently a new computing environment called the “Space Weather Cloud Computing System” of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). Now, the Sp...