Progress in Understanding Earth's Radiation Belts, Radiation Belts Saint Petersburg; Saint Petersburg, Russia, 4–6 August 2008

Fifty years after their discovery, Earth's radiation belts are an enduring major challenge, owing to the complex, interdependent phenomena controlling these particles, and motivated by the enormous role of space technology in our society. The recent Radiation Belts Saint Petersburg (RBSPb) workshop explored how to meet this challenge. Considerable discussion focused on learning more from observations, especially by revisiting existing spacecraft data sets with new analysis techniques or updated paradigms. New techniques were reported, such as extraction of energetic electron data from signal contamination in proton detectors and conversion of auroral proton images into global wave proxies. New insight concerning global aspects of the system (e.g., plasmaspheric wave‐particle interactions) enables less ambiguous interpretation of local measurements.