Word: allen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...free world was crying for U.S. satellite action. But the Vanguard program still sputtered and faltered. Suddenly, Van Allen got a radio message from Pickering. The Army had at last got permission to try its satellite. He asked if Van Allen would approve transfer of his instruments to Jupiter...
...Allen instantly cabled his approval, wired Ludwig to pack up all his apparatus and rush it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena. Then he flew back from New Zealand. In Pasadena, he and Pickering decided that the payload-basically a Geiger counter to detect cosmic rays in space and two incredibly light but powerful radio transmitters-would have to be modified in one respect. It contained a miniature tape recorder to record the cosmic-ray data during a trip around the earth and then transmit it quickly when triggered by a coded signal sent up from the ground. Designed...
Mysterious Silence. On Jan. 31, 1958, a Jupiter-C, fired from Cape Canaveral, put Explorer I into a fine orbit. With two massive Sputniks to compete with, the U.S. pinned its hopes for outdoing the Russians on the superiority of Van Allen's instruments...
...Allen waited in Iowa City. In a few days, long, wide paper tapes with wiggly red pen lines began to arrive from monitoring stations in the U.S. The cosmic-ray count that they showed was not unusual. But after two or three weeks, tapes began to dribble in from stations in South America. "As soon as we started looking at them, we saw the most remarkable situation." Over the U.S., where the satellite swooped low, the rate was about 40 counts a second. But over the equatorial region, where the satellite was rising to its highest point, the counting rates...
...March 28 Van Allen got the first tape and sat up all night poring over it. The cosmic-ray count seemed reasonable as long as the bird was at low altitude. When it climbed upward, the rate increased rapidly. Then, for some unaccountable reason, the count fell to nothing, stayed at nothing until the bird was back at lower altitude again...