Fleming is trying to figure out if Van Allen had any theoretical reason to suppose the military could use the Van Allen belts to attack a hostile nation. The scientific basis for these proposals is not clear. The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth's atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb's radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!) b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example) and - most peculiar - d) if a man-made explosion might "alter" the natural shape of the belts. That's why you see the sky filled with a rainbow of colors nearly all at once in the footage. Even lower, where more nitrogen atoms are present, the collisions throw off a blue light.īut in the Starfish Prime explosion, charged particles went in every direction. Then green appears as the electrons travel to lower altitudes where there are fewer oxygen atoms. The electrons first encounter a high concentration of oxygen at the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, causing the atoms to release a red light. It's similar to what causes the aurora borealis, although those electrons are coming from the solar wind pounding into Earth. Depending on the type of atom and the number of atoms, you get different colors. When many excited atoms release energy together, the light is visible to the naked eye. After holding onto it for a moment, the excess energy is released as light. According to NASA astrophysicist David Sibeck, those particles came streaming down through the Earth's atmosphere, energizing oxygen and nitrogen atoms, causing them to glow in different colors.Īs electrons collide with the atoms, energy is transferred to the atoms. When Starfish Prime detonated, charged particles - electrons - were released from the explosion. The concentration of each gas is different depending on the altitude. Nitrogen and oxygen are the two most abundant gases in our air. To understand where the colors come from in Starfish Prime, you first have to know a little bit about Earth's atmosphere.
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