James A. Van Allen - Dies at 91

Diamonddavej writes "The New York Times reports that the respected astrophysicist, James A. Van Allen, died yesterday at the age of 91. Apparently the fellow regularly worked at his office/laboratory up until a month ago. Prof. Van Allen team designed the Geiger counter that flew aboard Americas first orbiting satellite, Explorer 1. It detected unexpectedly intense levels of radiation caused by energetic particles trapped in the Earth magnetic field, the magnetosphere. The belts of radiation were mapped and characterised by later missions and were named the Van Allen belts in honour of their discoverer."

Dr. Van Allen staunch advocate for robots

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Van Allen was a staunch advocate of planetary exploration with robotic spacecraft and a critic of big-budget programs for human space flight. Describing himself as "a member of the loyal opposition," he argued that space science could be done better and less expensively when left to remote-controlled vehicles.

Re:Will be remembered for two things

[susano_otter]

Actually, NASA tapped Van Allen to spearhead further research into the belts he had discovered. The result of his further research was the conclusion that organisms could in fact safely traverse the belts. His research was a critical source of information for determining the velocities and trajectories necessary for such safe traversal.

So while it's true that he initially believe the belts would be impassable, his opinion changed as a result of his own careful study of the belts.

Re:Good week for conspiracy theorists.

[rivetgeek]

One "looses" the hounds. One "loses" their keys. A company who's CEO is found with a dead hooker or a live little boy suffers "losses". Get it right.

Re:Man-Made Equivalent

[WindBourne]

Sounds more like the threat of a Bond villain than an action of the United States government.

Keep in mind, that it was not just the US that was setting off nukes in the open atmosphere. USSR, China (IIRC Britain and France), and now a number of new countries have done so (and I suspect that a few more to come; just not on their soil). No doubt we set off quite a few, but it was about the same number as the USSR. Of course that is why we made a treaty prohibiting open atmosphere testing.

Re:RIP

[Kiliani]

The outer belt contains mostly relativistic electrons, energized in Earth's magnetosphere. The inner belt is made up of relativistic protons, a decay product of cosmic rays (having to do with the fact that a free neutron decays into a proton-electron pair, free neutrons having a half-life of only 11 minutes). See e.g. http://www.oulu.fi/~spaceweb/textbook/radbelts.htm l [www.oulu.fi] for a short description.

Gemini program

[Mark of THE CITY]

Michael Collins' memoir, "Carrying the Fire," included a table of radiation exposure for all the manned Gemini flights. Two readings were given; one for the commander, one for the pilot (who on some missions left the spacecraft to do some work outside). Gemini X, on which Collins was pilot, had the highest radiation levels, as their flight went in the South Atlantic magnetic anomoly, and others did not. Both are alive roughly 40 years later, in their mid-70s: not bad.

Van Allen did so much more...

[Pchelka]

Dr. Van Allen made so many more contributions to space science than just his discovery of the radiation belts. He was one of the founding fathers of the field of magnetospheric physics. He was also involved in the first satellite missions to visit Venus and Mars, as well as the Pioneer missions to the outer planets. Much of his opposition to manned space flight was motivated by the success of these early satellite missions and the enormous scientific return from them. He believed that unmanned missions like Pioneer could contribute much more to our scientific knowledge than manned missions. He also argued that unmanned missions were more cost effective than manned missions. For more information, I suggest reading his autobiography [uiowa.edu].