Spring-cleaning outer space: Belt up!

THE Van Allen belts, which were discovered in 1958 by some of the first artificial satellites, are a bane of those satellites' successors. The outer belt, which begins at an altitude of 13,000km above Earth's surface and goes up to 60,000km, is full of energetic electrons. The inner one, at 1,000-6,000km, is full of energetic protons. Both play havoc with satellites' electronics.But what if you could sweep them away? This is the ambition of Reinhard Friedel, a physicist at Los Alamos National La...