IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - Physicist
James A. Van Allen, a leader in space exploration who discovered the radiation
belts surrounding the Earth that
now bear his name, died Wednesday. He was 91.
The University of Iowa,
where he taught for years, announced the death in a statement on its Web site.
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.
Van Allen gained global attention in
the late 1950s when instruments he designed and placed aboard the first
U.S. satellite, Explorer I, discovered the bands of intense radiation that
surround the earth, now known as the Van Allen Belts.
The bands spawned a whole
new field of research known as magnetospheric physics, an area of study that
now involves more than 1,000 investigators in more than 20 countries.
The discovery also
propelled the United States in its space exploration race with the Soviet Union
and prompted Time magazine to put Van Allen on the cover of its May 4,
1959, issue.
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.
Though he was an early
advocate of a concerted national space program, Van Allen was a strong critic
of most manned space projects, once dismissing the U.S. proposal for a manned
space station "speculative and ... poorly founded.''
Explorer 1, which weighed
just 31 pounds (14 kilograms), was launched
Jan. 31, 1958, during an emotional time just after the Sputnik launches by
the Soviet Union created new Cold War fears. The instruments that Van Allen
developed for the mission were tiny Geiger counters to measure radiation.
Near the 35th anniversary
of the launch, Van Allen recalled in an Associated Press interview how
scientists waited tensely for confirmation the satellite was in orbit.
When the signal finally
came, "it was exhilarating. ... That was the big break, knowing it had made it
around the earth, that it was actually in orbit.''
The success of the flight
created nationwide celebration. Equally exciting for the scientists was the
discovery of the radiation belts, a discovery that happened slowly over the
next weeks and months as they pieced together data coming from the satellite.
"We had discovered a whole
new phenomenon which had not been known or predicted before,'' Van Allen said. "We
were really on top of the world, professionally speaking.'' Later in 1958,
another scientist proposed naming the belts for Van Allen.
His later projects included
the
Pioneer 10 and 11 flights, which studied the radiation belts of Jupiter in 1973 and 1974 and the
radiation belts of Saturn in 1979.
Van Allen continued to monitor data
from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft for decades as it became the most remote manmade
object, billions of miles away.
Closer to Earth, satellites
had revolutionized communications, military surveillance and environmental
monitoring. Asked in 1993 whether he envisioned the era of satellite
communications, he said: "I guess the honest answer is not really, but I'm not
astonished. That sort of thing was kicking around.''
In 1987, President Ronald
Reagan presented Van Allen with the National Medal of Science, the nation's
highest honor for scientific achievement.
Two years later, Van Allen
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.
Besides the discovery of
the Van Allen belts, the academy cited him for providing the first instruments
carried near another planet, those taken on the 1962 Venus mission by Mariner
2, and for his work training other space researchers.
"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 the Byrd Antarctic Expedition. 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 in
Baltimore, 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.
Through his career, he
continued to advocate unmanned
satellites, once telling a panel that manned space programs have been beset
by cost overruns but unmanned rockets "have delivered on their promises and
have gone far beyond them.''
In
testimony before a House subcommittee in 1985, Van Allen said that Reagan's
endorsement of a $20 billion (euro15.5 billion) manned space station
project was "so speculative and so poorly founded that no one of lesser stature
would have dared mention it to an informed audience.''
In 2004, he spoke out
again, arguing against Bush administration
plans for a space
station on the moon and a manned mission to Mars.
"I'm one of the most
durable and fervent advocates of space exploration, but my take is that we
could do it robotically at far less cost and far greater quantity and quality
of results,'' he said.
Van Allen was named to the National
Academy of Sciences in 1959. He also was a consultant to the U.S. Congress
Office of Technology Assessment, NASA and the Space Studies Board of the
National Academy of Sciences.
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