Abstract
The radiation belts in the Earth’s magnetosphere pose a hazard to satellite systems and spacecraft missions (both manned and unmanned), heavily affecting payload design and resources, thus resulting in an impact on the overall mission performance and final costs. The NASA AE9/AP9/SPM radiation models for energetic electrons, protons, and plasma provide useful information on the near-Earth environment, but they are still incomplete as to some features and, for some energy ranges, their predictions are not based on a statistically sufficient sample of direct measurements. Therefore, it is of the upmost importance to provide new data and direct measurements to improve their output. In this work, the AP9 model is applied to the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-01) orbit to estimate the flux of energetic protons over the South Atlantic Anomaly during a short testing period of one day, 1 January 2021. Moreover, a preliminary comparison with proton data obtained from the High-Energy Particle Detector (HEPD) on board CSES-01 is carried out. This estimation will serve as the starting ground for a forthcoming complete data analysis, enabling extensive testing and validation of current theoretical and empirical models.
Highlights
The radiation belts, known as Van Allen belts, are regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere where energetic charged particles are subject to long-term magnetic trapping
TLEs propagation using a chain of custom programs to comply with the technique employed by the AE9/AP9 models; IGRF-13 [20] model-based routines have been applied to the calculated trajectory to reconstruct the intensity of the magnetic field at a 1 second resolution, together with McIllwain’s L parameter in dipolar approximation [44]; these will be useful benchmarks in the future comparison to HEPD data
Two sets of geographical/geomagnetic coordinates have been obtained: one calculated by NASA routines and another extracted by Limadou external routines used for trajectory propagation and magnetic field reconstruction since launch
Summary
The radiation belts, known as Van Allen belts, are regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere where energetic charged particles are subject to long-term magnetic trapping. Since the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts, after the launch of the first Explorer satellites in 1958 and the Pioneer in 1959 [5,6], the scientific community has been considerably involved in modeling this space radiation environment. All these efforts were mostly aimed to meet the practical need of better understanding the significant radiation hazard to spacecraft and human crews.
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