Word: allen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Allen summed up his conclusions: "Apparently, something happens on the sun. It sends out a burst of gases. The reservoirs above our earth shake like a bowl of jelly. The radiation droozles out at the ends and makes the auroral displays at the North and South Poles...
Hole in Space. Widely popular in a profession full of jealousies, Van Allen has a cheerful scorn for his new-found importance. Recently, he told a solemn gathering of scientists, he had been asked for a definition of space. "After a vast research program, which depended very heavily upon the use of a number of highspeed computers, I am pleased to offer you the result: 'Space is that in which everything else is.' In other words, 'Space is the hole that...
Among Van Allen's immediate interests is a 20-lb. satellite scheduled for launching next fall. If all goes well, it will settle into a slim, elliptical orbit, soaring out six earth radii (24.000 miles) at apogee. It should stay up for hundreds of years, and it will have solar batteries to keep its radio voices alive for a long time. Its duty will be to report continuously on the radiation belt, study how it is affected by sunspots and other solar eruptions. Its fluctuations may have important effects on the earth's weather...
Next: Venus. Like most other scientists, Van Allen is in no hurry to put a man into space. "A man is a fabulous nuisance in space right now," he says. "He's not worth all the cost of putting him up there and keeping him comfortable and working." Instruments are lighter, tougher and less demanding, are sensitive to many things that human senses ignore. They already have memories (tape recorders), and they can carry computers that will permit them to make judgments. An instrument-manned Venus probe should be able to make observations and adjust its course by firing...
Such a vehicle would have important military connotations. But James Van Allen, a pure scientist turned spaceman, sees such projects in simpler terms. Says he: "The satellite is a natural extension of rockets, which are natural extensions of planes and balloons, which are natural extensions of man's climbing trees and mountains in order to get up higher and thus have a better view...