CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Twin satellites rocketed into orbit Thursday on a quest to explore Earth's treacherous radiation belts and protect the planet from solar outbursts.

NASA launched the science probes before dawn, sending them skyward aboard an unmanned rocket.

"They're now at home in the Van Allen belts where they belong," said Nicola Fox, the deputy project scientist for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

It's the first time two spacecraft are flying in tandem amid the punishing radiation belts of Earth, brimming with highly charged particles capable of wrecking satellites.

These new satellites shielded with thick aluminum are designed to withstand an onslaught of cosmic rays for the next two years.

"We're going to a place that other missions try to avoid and we need to live there for two years. That's one of our biggest challenges," said Richard Fitzgerald, project manager for Johns Hopkins.

Fitzgerald wore a black tuxedo for the big event, "my good-luck tux." It's the same suit he wore for the launch of another set of twin science satellites that still are going strong after 10 years. "I'm hoping for the same" with these Radiation Belt Storm Probes, he said.

The Johns Hopkins lab built the radiation belt probes for NASA, and is operating them from Maryland following a week of launch delays.

Scientists expect the $686 million mission to shed light on how the sun affects the Van Allen radiation belts, named after the astrophysicist who discovered them a half-century ago.

Earth's two doughnut-shaped radiation belts stretch thousands of miles into space; these inner and outer belts are full of high-energy particles from the sun and elsewhere in the cosmos, trapped by Earth's magnetic field.

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NASA launches twin satellites to radiation belts