90130_ Report This Comment Date: August 11, 2006 07:44AM
Physicist James A. Van Allen and scientists waited tensely for confirmation that
the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I, had reached orbit. It was January 1958 and
the launch came just months after the Soviets' launch of the first Sputnik
satellite.
Van Allen, who died Wednesday at age 91, had designed instruments on board
Explorer I that would discover belts of radiation now known as the Van Allen
Belts. His experiments taught scientists to look at space not as a vacuum but as
a place pulsating with energy, waiting to be explored.
When the signal from Explorer I finally came, "it was exhilarating,"
Van Allen told The Associated Press in an interview 35 years later. "We
were really on top of the world, professionally speaking."
In a career that stretched over more than a half-century, Van Allen designed
scientific instruments for dozens of research flights, first with small rockets
and balloons, and eventually with space probes that traveled to distant planets
and beyond.
The discovery of the belts spawned a whole new field of research known as
magnetospheric physics.
"Many of my generation really went into space science because of that
discovery," said Edward Stone, professor of physics at the California
Institute of Technology. "It revealed a whole new area of science that was
just waiting to be discovered."
The folksy, pipe-smoking scientist, called "Van" by friends, retired
from full-time teaching in 1985. But he continued to write, oversee research,
counsel students and monitor data gathered by satellites. He worked in a large,
cluttered corner office on the seventh floor of the physics and astronomy
building that bears his name.
"I love to work and I love this subject," he said in 1993. As for
quitting, he said, "not as long as I'm able I won't."
Van Allen was born Sept. 7, 1914, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. As an undergraduate
at Iowa Wesleyan College, he helped prepare research instruments for one of
Admiral Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expeditions. He got his master's and Ph.D.
from the University of Iowa.
After serving in the Naval Reserve during World War II, he was a researcher at
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., supervising
tests of captured German V-2 rockets and developing similar rockets to probe the
upper atmosphere.
One of the highlights of this early research was the 1953 discovery of electrons
believed to be the driving force behind the northern and southern lights.
His projects included the Pioneer 10 and 11 flights, which studied Jupiter's
radiation belts in 1973 and 1974 and Saturn's radiation belts in 1979. He
continued to monitor data from the Pioneer 10 for decades as it became the most
remote manmade object, billions of miles away.
Van Allen was named to the National Academy of Sciences in 1959. In 1987, he
received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for
scientific achievement.
Two years later, he received the Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences in Stockholm each year since 1982 for scientific research in
areas not recognized by the Nobel Prizes.
Anonymous Report This Comment Date: August 11, 2006 12:21PM
Interesting.I wonder if he beleived in E.T.'s