[meteorite-list] Van Allen dies

From: Rob McCafferty <rob_mccafferty_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Aug 9 19:22:42 2006
Message-ID: <20060809232240.711.qmail_at_web50912.mail.yahoo.com>

That's not a nice thing to know. I don't know, I
always assume these guys died decades ago. I was just
as gutted when Clyde Tombaugh died.

I remember being at uni and seeing a diagram of the
Earth with the Van Allen belts next to it. I Was
amazed at the beauty of the Earths Magnetic field.

 Along side it was the same diagram only slightly
modified and I thought "Hmmm, That looks like an
Electric guitar". Those familiar with the Van Allen
belts will know how little modification it requires to
acquire this appearance.

The caption underneath read "Van Halen Belts"

I never had quite the same outlook on life ever again
once I stopped laughing.
May God accept his soul, and as Newton said "If I have
seen a little further, it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants"

--- Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_charter.net> wrote:

> Not directly meteorite related, but he was an
> important figure to the space
> program:
>
>
http://www.woi-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5262147&nav=1LFX
>
> 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.
>
> ``Jim Van Allen was a good friend of our family. His
> loss saddens Christie and
> me,'' Gov. Tom Vilsack said. ``His passing is a sad
> day for science in America
> and the world.
>
> 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, 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 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 President
> Reagan's endorsement of a $20 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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Received on Wed 09 Aug 2006 07:22:40 PM PDT