Word: allens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Yale coach Ethan Allen has assigned southpaw Pete Higuchi to handle the Elis' pitching. Featuring a slow curve-ball delivery, Higuchi triumphed over Princeton 3 to 2 last Saturday and has a 2-1 league record...
Choked Tubes. Less reassuring news came from a team of cosmic ray experts at the State University of Iowa headed by Dr. James A. Van Allen. Both Explorer I and Explorer III, said Van Allen, ran into a belt of intense radiation at about 600 miles elevation. Each of the satellites carries a single Geiger tube to count cosmic rays. The radio transmitter of Explorer I sends a signal whenever the tube has made 128 counts. Explorer III has a magnetic tape that records the tube's counts during each circuit of the earth and reports to a ground...
...Allen was sure that no ray-free belt could exist between the earth and space. The only reasonable explanation, he decided, was that the silenced Geiger tubes had been knocked out temporarily by radiation too intense for them to handle. So he subjected a spare tube to X-ray bombardment in the laboratory. After studying its behavior, he decided that the tubes carried by the satellites must have passed through radiation equivalent to 35,000 counts per second, but were so choked up that they could not report their experience...
Plasma from the Sun. The radiation belt, Van Allen conjectured, is probably a "plasma" made of disassociated hydrogen atoms (protons and electrons) that came originally from the sun and are held high above the earth by the earth's magnetic field. The belt may extend outward for two earth radii (8,000) miles before it disappears. Van Allen suspects that the supply of plasma fluctuates a good deal; the particles tend to leak down to the earth's atmosphere and are replenished from time to time by fresh particles shot into space by disturbances...
...radiation zone is by no means a "death belt" that will keep humans from reaching space, but it might do some damage to men who live for a long time in a satellite. Van Allen figured that the radiation level inside the satellite might reach about 0.06 roentgens per hour. At this rate a man would receive in five hours his maximum weekly permissible dose of 0.3 roentgens. A small amount of lead shielding would reduce the dose to a supportable level. The crew of an outbound spaceship need not worry about the radiation belt. If moving fast enough...