Word: allens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Allen was temporarily diverted from Rockoons to a project at Princeton University to develop thermonuclear power. But his Iowa graduate students carried on the Rockoon firings off the coast of Newfoundland. One day the students put in an excited call to Van Allen in Princeton. The cosmic rays near Newfoundland, the students reported, seemed to rise to incredibly high intensity above 30 miles...
Obviously, concluded Van Allen, "there was something wild and woolly going on." The aurora borealis is most intense at latitudes north of Newfoundland. It was believed to be caused by charged particles of some sort raining down from space and concentrated around the Magnetic North Pole by the earth's magnetic field. Though Van Allen could not guess it then, the "cosmic rays" detected by his Rockoons were directly related to the northern lights, and were really a fringe of the worldwide radiation belt that he was to discover five years later...
Satellites Next. Rockoons had carried him as high as they could go. Van Allen began to take an interest in satellites. Since his White Sands days, he had kept an eye on U.S. rocketry. His association with the Navy had been long and pleasant, but he became an outspoken advocate of the Army's Jupiter-C, whose high-speed stages had been designed by Pickering's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "I made rather a pest of myself around Washington about Jupiter." he admits. But the Pentagon shunted Jupiter aside in favor of the Navy's Vanguard...
Despite his candid partisanship, Van Allen's status as the best instrumentator of space was so indisputable by this time that he found himself commissioned to provide Vanguard's instrumentation. He dutifully set to work. But he took the precaution of finding out just what the Army had planned for its banned Explorer I satellite. The Army informed him that it had in mind a cylinder 6 in. in diameter. By no coincidence at all, the instrument package Van Allen produced for the 21-in. Vanguard sphere proved to be cylindrical, and just 5½ in. in diameter...
First Beep. With this work well underway and no satellite launching expected for some time, Van Allen was not a man to sit around idly. He got aboard the Navy icebreaker Glacier and headed for Antarctica to measure cosmic rays near the South Magnetic Pole. On Oct. 4, when the Glacier was wallowing southward across the Pacific, a report that the Russians had launched a satellite came over the ship's radio. Van Allen went to work on the Glacier's 20-mc. receiver, and within half an hour it yielded vigorous beeping sounds. That was Sputnik...