ten billion butterfly sneezes

University of Iowa Regent Distinguished Professor of Physics , James Van Allen, has passed away at age 91. Professor Van Allen had designed much of the instrumentation carried aboard the first successful US satellite, Explorer I, which went into orbit in 1958. This tiny satellite discovered bands of intense radiation around the earth; these were later named the Van Allen Radiation belts. US orbital spacecraft of that era were necessarily small and lightweight; the rockets that put them into orbit generally used repurposed technology from the World War II era, and simply didn’t have the payload capacity of the launch vehicles of today. So efficiency was at a premium.

As a young geek wanna be in 1958, the space program, both manned and unmanned, captured my attention, and I read everything I could find about it.

Prof. Van Allen remained actively involved in the space program into his latter years, as the article says:

Among the other accomplishments of which he was most proud was his 1973 first-ever survey of the radiation belts of Jupiter using the Pioneer 10 spacecraft and his 1979 discovery and survey of Saturn’s radiation belts using data from the Pioneer 11 spacecraft.

And then:

Though he retired from active teaching in 1985, he continued to monitor data from Pioneer 10 throughout the spacecraft’s 1972-2003 operational lifetime and serve as an interdisciplinary scientist for the Galileo spacecraft, which reached Jupiter on Dec. 7, 1995.

A long and storied career indeed. I was particularly impressed by this:

Van Allen the scientist described himself as “a member of the loyal opposition” when it came to discussions of big-budget space programs, declaring that space science could be done better and more cheaply when left to remote-controlled, unmanned spacecraft. NASA’s move toward cheaper, more focused unmanned spacecraft during the 1990s was, at least in part, a result of Van Allen’s advocacy.

Small, efficient, and utilitarian. RIP, Professor, you were a pioneer of the uplifter movement.

-k-

Cross posted to The Uplifter Weblog.

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