Pioneering In Space

Every weekday morning, Iowa City's most famous resident steps into his 1986 Jeep Cherokee and drives two miles from his home to the University of Iowa campus. He enters Van Allen Hall, makes his way to his cluttered office, checks his e-mail and begins poring over data. At 88, physicist James Van Allen still revels in exposing the secrets of nature--45 years after making the first significant discovery of the space age.

It's not that he needs any more honors. The university's physics and astronomy building already bears his name. He has been immortalized by his 1958 discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts, those charged particles trapped by the magnetic field in earth-encircling rings high above the atmosphere. And Van Allen has played a key role as a principal investigator in the first missions to Venus and Mars by Mariner spacecraft and to Jupiter by the Pioneers, and has served as a participating scientist for Galileo, which is still in orbit around Jupiter.

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Last week Van Allen was reviewing ozone measurements obtained a half-century ago, when Aerobee rockets carrying detectors he designed were shot high into the atmosphere. He's comparing the data with current ozone readings to determine what changes, if any, have occurred. "With the flap about the hole in the ozone layer," he says, "it's a very lively subject right now."

As is Van Allen. He works at least six hours a day, scanning new scientific literature and regularly charting fluctuations in the intensity of incoming cosmic rays. In a paper published last year in the prestigious Geophysical Research Letters, he reported new data from the Pioneer 10 and the two Voyager spacecraft, all still alive at the time and the most distant man-made objects in the universe. Those data proved that the effect of the solar wind, the charged particles emitted by the sun, reaches out more than 7.5 billion miles in all directions. The finding provided "beautiful evidence," Van Allen says, that the boundaries of the solar system extend at least that far into space.

How does Van Allen remain so creative and sharp? His wife Abbie credits his lifelong, intense focus on his work. "He can hardly wait to get up in the morning and go to his office," she says. "He has so many ideas, he realizes that the time is short, and he worries that he won't get all his ideas written up." That leaves little time to socialize, and Van Allen confines his outside activities to monthly meetings of the Club, an Iowa City men's discussion group, and to occasional travel, during which he and Abbie visit their five children and seven grandchildren, scattered in cities from Vancouver to Princeton, N.J. He eschews games and exercise, calling recreation "a nuisance, as opposed to doing something of a thoughtful nature." Despite his sedentary lifestyle, he says, "I'm lucky enough to enjoy reasonably good health."

Still, Van Allen concedes that he's not the man he was at 60. "I find that it really takes me longer to do things and longer to get things through my head — but, hey, I'm still pretty good!" he says. It may be that Van Allen has identified with his favorite spacecraft, the aging Pioneer 10, launched in 1972 on the first mission to cruise by Jupiter. Last December, when his instrument package was the only one of the 11 aboard Pioneer 10 that was still working, he waited patiently as a powerful radio telescope at Goldstone, Calif., sent the craft a command that took more than 11 hours to reach it. Pioneer responded, and another 11 hours later a telescope of the Deep Space Network picked up its faint signal. "It was still there," says Van Allen proudly, "and it was still working." By February, however, Pioneer's voice could no longer be heard, and NASA reluctantly abandoned the mission. But Van Allen's voice is still here, coming in loud and clear.