Scott Solomon

Well, if it's the sun, then those exposures should be higher during daytime than during nighttime.

Mm-hmm.

and it wasn't.

They even measured it during an eclipse.

It should decrease slightly when the sun is being blocked by the moon, right?

It doesn't do that.

And then what ended up happening was once we were able to send satellites deeper into space, the initial measurements, this is done on a Geiger counter, right?

So the thing that clicks when you're trying to detect radiation, it makes like a

It's kind of sound like that, right?

And the more rapid the clicks are, the higher the radiation exposure.

Well, the very first time one of these was sent up on a satellite, it's clicking, clicking, clicking, the rate is getting higher, and then all of a sudden it just stops.

So it's like, what the heck's going on?

Is there just no, suddenly no radiation?

And it turned out, no, actually, there was so much radiation, it was just overwhelming the sensors of the Geiger counter.

Yeah.

Exactly, yeah.

So what they did, they sent another satellite with a different type of device or calibrated differently or whatever, and then we're able to determine, oh yeah, you get to this certain kind of elevation in orbit around the Earth, and all of a sudden there's just huge amounts of radiation.

So we now know that there's these Van Allen radiation belts.

There's like an inner belt and an outer belt.

So you can kind of picture this as like,