Of the many outstanding accomplishments in James Van Allen's remarkable career, the one I want to focus on is his role as a university researcher and educator. This role not only made Iowa a major player in the scientific exploration of space, but also led to the education of an entire generation of space scientists. I am one of that generation, as are several others in this audience.

I arrived here as a freshman electrical engineering student in the fateful year of 1957. I was 17 years old. Less than three weeks after I arrived, on October 4, Sputnik 1 was launched. This event had a tremendous impact on the United States, for we were in the middle of the cold war - sales of underground bomb shelters were flourishing - and now we had a Russian object flying overhead. It also had a tremendous effect on me as I had read extensively about rockets and space travel in high school. Almost every night when it was clear I would go out and watch Sputnik go over head. Then, just a few months later, on February 1, 1958, the United States successfully launched Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, with Professor Van Allen's Geiger tube on board. Van Allen was instantly famous. It was soon revealed that he had made a totally unexpected discovery, namely that Earth was surrounded by two intense radiation belts. With Explorer 1 we had not only caught up with the Russians, but had made the first great discovery of the space age. Because of my fascination with space flight I decided to go over to Prof. Van Allen's office to see if I could get a job. I didn't get to see him, but I did talk with his secretary, Agnes McLaughlin, then Agnes Costello, and filled out a job application explaining my experience building electronics for radio-controlled model airplanes, which was one of my passions in high school. A few weeks later I received a handwritten note from Prof. Van Allen inviting me to work in his group, which started an association that changed my life forever.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s the University of Iowa was the center around which all space science revolved, and Van Allen was at the center of this activity. In the short span of two years, 1958-59, he provided Geiger tube instrumentation for no less than eleven spacecraft. With the data from these spacecraft Van Allen and his associates developed the first detailed understanding of Earth's radiation belts and the magnetized region around Earth that we now call the magnetosphere. In 1960 he obtained funding from the Office of Naval Research for the development of a spacecraft, Injun 1, which was to become the first successful spacecraft ever to be completely developed at a University. Eventually this program turned into a series of five spacecraft, Injuns 1 through 5, that were built over a period of about seven years. Among other things, the data from these spacecraft, which were all polar orbiters, provided the first detailed measurements of the charged particles that are responsible for Earth's aurora. The amazing thing about this early period is that almost all of the design, testing, and scientific analysis was carried out by students, many of whom were working on thesis projects under his direction. One of the secrets of Van Allen's success was that he let his students take on a great deal of responsibility. He was a great leader, very personable, the perfect role model. He loved working with students and was a great mentor. Many thrived under this system, eventually receiving their degrees, and leaving Iowa to play leading roles in space research at key government, industry, and university laboratories. He was the advisor for 35 Ph.D. and 48 M.S. students. In his role model, students sometimes emulated him in unique ways. In the early days, Van Allen often smoked a pipe, frequently holding it in a particularly thoughtful pose. Some students also started smoking pipes, trying to create exactly the same image. Bruce Randall comes to mind. Although Van Allen smoked less as the years went by, he never really gave it up. Even after smoking was banned in all university buildings, a slight hint of smoke could sometimes be detected coming from his office. Nobody ever complained - after all, it was his building, Van Allen Hall.

I personally worked on all of the Injun projects, first as an engineer, and later as a physicist. My transition to physics occurred as the result of a low-frequency radio instrument that I designed for Injun III. This instrument revealed that an amazing variety of radio "sounds" existed in space, now called "plasma waves." Some of these sounds clearly originated from the radiation belts. I can vividly remember sitting in Van Allen's office listening to some of these sounds on a tape recorder, and the amazing look on his face, and then his comment, "How are you ever going to explain these things?" As the physics involved was beyond anyone's area of expertise at Iowa, he soon recommended that I move to Stanford University to work on my Ph.D. thesis with Robert Helliwell, who had studied some of these radio phenomena with ground-based radio receivers, and to study the newly developing field of plasma physics by taking a course from a well-known expert in the field, Peter Sturrock. I moved to Stanford, leaving only one day after marrying my wife, Marie, who is here today. I will also always remember that when I arrived at Stanford a telegram was waiting for me from Van Allen, congratulating us on getting married and asking if we had found a place to live. He also had a question that I should start working on immediately. I always thought that this was a good example of his concern and care for the welfare of his students, even when they were far away. I finished my Ph.D. about a year later and, to my surprise, received an offer to return to Iowa as an assistant professor, with the understanding that I would continue my research on space plasma waves, and start teaching a course on plasma physics. Obviously, I accepted the offer.

In addition to his research, Van Allen regularly taught courses on a variety of subjects. Some of these were advanced courses, such as "Electricity and Magnetism" and "Solar and Terrestrial Physics." He was very precise and analytical in all of his lectures, and seemed to enjoyed working difficult problems in class. However, his favorite course was 29:62 General Astronomy, which he taught for seventeen years, until he retired in 1985. This was a large undergraduate class that could be taken by anyone with an interest in science. I never took this class, but my wife did. This was not an "almost-don't-have-to-study" type of class. It was full of basic physics concepts, such as Newton's law of gravity and Kepler's laws of planetary motion, with numerous equations that had to be mastered. He assigned plenty of homework, and later published a book giving the solution of many of the homework problems that he developed for this class. The most famous part of this class was the moon plot exercise, which required students to go out every night for a month or two and plot the path of the moon across the sky. This led to many stories, such as reports of the police being called to investigate students who were standing in some dark parking lot holding their arms up toward the moon, as if carrying out some moon-worship ritual. They were actually holding a calibrated string to measure the angle between the moon and a nearby star. It soon got to be common knowledge around campus that anyone seen staring up at the moon in the middle of the night was just doing Van Allen's moon plot exercise. Later, after he retired in 1985, I taught this same course, and found out how demanding the moon plot exercise really was. You see, there is always a period during the month when you have to get up in the middle of the night to observe the moon. I learned why some astronomers work during the night and sleep during the day. Even today, more than twenty years after he last taught that course, it is not uncommon to run across people from almost any walk of life who say that one of their most memorable experiences at the University of Iowa was taking "Van Allen's Astronomy Course." Abbie Van Allen gave me a long list of tributes that she received from various people after his death. One frequent comment in these tributes is the positive experience they had taking his astronomy course. For example, one person wrote "I attended his General Astronomy class, and consider it one of the best classes of my college career."

Of the many spacecraft projects in which he participated, his favorite was almost certainly Pioneers 10 and 11. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972, and made the historic first flyby of Jupiter in 1973. During this flyby his instrumentation revealed that Jupiter had a huge disk-like magnetosphere and an extremely intense radiation belt. Pioneer 11 arrived at Jupiter in 1974 and by the miracle of gravity assist was able to go on to a flyby of Saturn in 1979 where it revealed that Saturn also had a large extended magnetosphere and an intense radiation belt. Again, Van Allen was in the forefront of discovery. However, the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions didn't end there. After the final flybys of these planets, both spacecraft ended up on escape trajectories from the Sun, moving outward toward the final frontier, interstellar space. Two other spacecraft, Voyagers 1 and 2, on which I have plasma wave instruments, are also on similar trajectories. The ultimate objective of these missions is to explore the outer limits of the heliosphere, which is the extended ionized gaseous envelope of the Sun, and to penetrate into the interstellar medium through a hypothesized boundary called the heliopause. In the years after he retired, he continued to analyze the Pioneer 10 and 11 data, and wrote numerous papers on the entry of cosmic rays into the heliosphere and the effects of solar flares far out from the Sun. He continued to study these and other subjects right up to the time of his death at age 91. As an amazing commentary on his drive to do research and his persistence in publishing the results, Chris Stevens, who handled his correspondence and typing, was called to his bedside in intensive care shortly before he died in order to type the replies to referees of two papers that he had recently written. These papers are to be published shortly.

In closing, I would like to say that it has been a great honor and a privilege to have worked with James Van Allen. We will all miss him greatly. I extend my sincere condolences to Abbie Van Allen and the entire Van Allen family.

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