Two U.S. satellites designed to study the radiation belts soar above the Earth's atmosphere ' were successfully launched into orbit on Thursday.
The twins started a mission of two years $686 million, when they blew up before dawn aboard an unmanned rocket at the spaceport U.S. Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The probes will determine how identical belts composed of electrically charged particles from the Sun and from deep space, are affected by energy disturbances that cause them to expand. The radiation belts, which are trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, ' can wreak havoc with communications satellites and solar panels.
The U.S. Space Agency
NASA says probes will fly as close as 161 kilometres next to each other and as 38,000 kilometers away from each other.
The radiation belts are named after the late James Van Allen, physicist who discovered in 1958, using a simple Geiger counter placed inside an Explorer, the first U.S. science satellite.
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