The Earth's inner radiation belt, the first discovery of the Space Age (Van Allen et al., 1958), consists of high energy protons (10 MeV-1 GeV) and lower energy electrons trapped in the Earth's magnetic field. The sources of inner belt protons, the focus of this paper, include Cosmic Ray Albedo Neutron Decay (CRAND) and Solar Energetic Protons (Selesnick et al., 2010;Selesnick et al., 2007). The very energetic proton population, while constrained to an altitude below ∼10 4 km, is a known hazard to low and medium altitude satellites (Dyer, 2002;Stassinopoulos & Raymond, 1988) and to the International Space Station whose orbit encounters the South Atlantic Anomaly. The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) is a region where the inner zone proton flux is observed to increase at low altitude. This is due to a weakening in the Earth's magnetic field presently spanning a range at 500 km altitude of −90 to +40° in geographic longitude and −50 to 0° in geographic latitude. This region of weaker magnetic field, which is slowly decreasing in time (Pavón-Carrasco & De Santis, 2016), allows inner zone protons to mirror closer to Earth.
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