NASA's Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to pass through the Van Allen belts on its way to orbit the moon in 1968. The next year, Apollo 11 put humans on the moon for the first time.

Giant donut-shaped swaths of magnetically trapped, highly energetic charged particles surround Earth. James Van Allen, a physicist at the University of Iowa, discovered these radiation belts in ...

The Van Allen belts are bands of high energy particles surrounding our planet. How can did we send people through them? Why wasn't that a problem for the Apollo astronauts?

In February, the Van Allen Probes mission operations team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory—where the probes were designed and built—began a series of orbit descent maneuvers that will ...

The final phase of the exploration will start on February 12, 2019, when one of the twin Van Allen Probes kicks off a series of orbit descent maneuvers to bring the lowest point of its orbit to ...

The high amounts of radiation within the belts make them a threat to satellites in geostationary orbit, which must carry sufficient shielding if their orbit lies within the belts. Probing plasmas To ...

Located beyond low-Earth orbit, these radiation belts were discovered in 1958 by astrophysicist James Van Allen who helped uncover the key to enabling exploration of the outer solar system.

In a mission 11 years in the making, NASA launched a pair of Johns Hopkins University satellites into the Van Allen radiation belts Thursday to study their structure in unprecedented detail.

In a mission 11 years in the making, NASA today launched a pair of Johns Hopkins University satellites into the Van Allen radiation belts to study their structure in unprecedented detail.

NASA’s Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to pass through the Van Allen belts on its way to orbit the moon in 1968. The next year, Apollo 11 put humans on the moon for the first time. In that ...