Mr Ribas’s blog

It doesn’t happen often that I can find something relevant for two of my courses; but I have been teaching magnetic fields to my Year 13 class, while my Year 11 are looking at radioactivity and the Northern Lights.

So here is an interesting article about a bizarre 1950s experiment that could be interesting – it involved exploding nuclear bombs in outer space, so that a stream of charged particles would be produced travelling along the magnetic field of the Earth. This would create a radiation belt which would affect enemy satellites.

I have not been brave enough to watch the entire 45 minute video, but the diagram is really quite something…  Oh, and for my newly-found bunch of foreign readers, if anyone is interested, more information in the usual place.