Christopher Russell’s discovery of zebra stripes in space resolves a half-century mystery

In the 1960s, NASA launched six satellites to study the Earth’s atmosphere, magnetosphere and the space between Earth and the moon. Using observations from those satellites, Christopher Russell, a UCLA graduate student at the time, detected mysterious plasma waves in the Van Allen radiation belts, the donut-shaped rings surrounding the Earth that contain high-energy particles trapped by the planet’s magnetic field.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/scientists-discovery-of-zebra-stripes-in-space-resolves-a-half-century-mystery