James Van Allen, R.I.P.

The discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts around planet Earth and unintentional contributor to a thousand moon-landing-hoax theories has gone to that highly charged field in the sky.

Walter Sullivan's New York Times obit calls Van Allen "the physicist who made the first major scientific discovery of the early space age," and although or because I don't know enough to render an opinion, I won't challenge that judgment. Even more impressive is that this was a real meat-and-potatoes discovery even for 1958, when Van Allen bundled a Geiger counter—technology more than four decades old at the time—into the Explorer 1 probe. How powerful was James van Allen? The very belts that carry his name emit enough radiation to overwhelm a Geiger counter. Shielding for the donut-shaped belts had to be supplied by Oak Ridge researchers. See van Allen flexing with William H. Pickering and Wernher von Braun. Remember James van Allen as you paddle toward the Aurora Borealis.