A physicist at the right place at the right time: It was 1957, and Russia started the space race with the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Its payload: a beeping radio transmitter to prove its presence.
Four months later the U.S. one-upped it: Van Allen developed a miniature science payload for Explorer 1 to measure any radiation. To everyone’s surprise, there was something to measure. “His discovery of the Van Allen [radiation] belts was the first major scientific discovery of the Space Age,” said Ed Stone, former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built Explorer 1. “The discovery was unexpected, and that’s what made it so exciting. It set the tone for the further exploration of space by revealing how much there was to be discovered.”
The discovery created a new science specialty: magnetospheric physics. Van Allen continued his collaboration with JPL, working on the Pioneer and Voyager fly-by missions, the Galileo probe to Jupiter, and the current Cassini mission to Saturn. And he still managed to remain a college professor into his 70s, and was so good People magazine named him one of the top 10 college professors in the U.S. He died August 9 from heart failure at age 91.