Word: nearly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cluttered room that was once a hallway, Van Allen checked over a tangle of small, glittering electrical parts weighing a pound or so, which might be a transmitter designed to broadcast its voice over thousands of miles of empty space. Near it was what looked like a cylinder of dirty pink soap. It was plastic foam, encasing apparatus that might be destined to orbit the sun until the end of the solar system. Puffing on a battered pipe, Van Allen peered, commented, sketched an idea for a new circuit, then was summoned to take a long-distance call from...
...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...
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...
Another theory is that the Sputniks' Geiger tubes were blacked out near apogee by Van Allen radiation, and that the Russian scientists did not know how to interpret this odd behavior. The live dog carried in Sputnik II died in about a week, but the Russians have not told whether it was affected by radiation sickness. Very likely they do not know...
...radiation belts, with a low-intensity slot between them. Studying the tapes, he concluded that the outer belt is made of weaker particles, presumably protons and electrons that come from the sun. At its outer edges, it curves downward in "horns" that hit the atmosphere near the magnetic poles. These horns were what produced the northern lights...