SM002-0004
Radiation Belt Remediation with Artificial Injection of Plasma Waves
Monday, 7 December 2020
Poster
Quinn Marksteiner1, Gian Luca Delzanno1, Geoffrey D Reeves1, Jay Albert2, Patrick L Colestock1, Misa Cowee1, Gregory Cunningham1, Seth E Dorfman3, Leanne Delma Duffy4, Xiangrong Fu5, Christopher Andrew Jeffery1, Oleksandr Koshkarov6, James McCollough7, Vadim Roytershteyn3, Kevin Shipman4, Kateryna Yakymenko8 and Nikolai Yampolsky1, (1)Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (2)Air Force Research Lab, Albuquerque, NM, United States, (3)Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)Los Alamos National Laboratory, AOT-AE, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (5)Los Alamos National Laboratory, ISR, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (6)Los Alamos National Laboratory, T-5, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (7)Air Force Research Laboratory, Albuquerque, United States, (8)Institute Geospheres Dynamics, Moscow, Russia
Abstract:
A high-altitude nuclear explosion (HANE) at low latitudes creates an artificial radiation belt of MeV electrons by beta decay of radioactive fission fragments. The HANE belt can be much more intense than the natural radiation belts and, depending on the L drift shell where HANE electrons are created, could last for very long times. Within weeks a HANE belt could damage all Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites not specifically hardened against a nuclear event, complicating and possibly strongly delaying the replacement of damaged satellites. A radiation belt remediation strategy that returns the environment to safe levels as soon as possible (ideally within less than a month) is the most viable option to mitigate the consequences of HANE and protect our critical space infrastructure.
The RBR-ACES project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is developing an end-to-end modeling framework to study radiation belt remediation strategies based on artificial injection of plasma waves to enhance losses of HANE electrons via wave-particle interaction physics. RBR-ACES describes the chain of physical processes from wave generation (from antennas, pulsed electron beams and possibly chemical release) to wave propagation in the near-Earth environment to the effect of the global wave field on HANE electrons. Laboratory experiments and space-based experiments and observations will be used to validate the modeling framework. These include antenna and electron-beam experiments at UCLA, the Beam-PIE electron-beam rocket experiment and the AFRL DSX mission, in addition to precipitation data from the natural environment. We will present an overview of the RBR-ACES modeling framework in its current form, with an emphasis on future developments targeting the non-linear physics of wave generation and wave-particle interactions that can be very important for the effectiveness of a remediation scheme.
