James A. Van Allen

James Alfred Van Allen (September 7, 1914 – August 9, 2006) was an American space physicist at the University of Iowa who was instrumental in establishing the field of magnetospheric research in space. His discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts in 1958, zones of energetic charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field, was the first major scientific finding of the Space Age. As principal investigator for scientific instruments on 24 Earth satellites and planetary missions, Van Allen provided the first in situ measurements of the magnetospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, pioneered the use of energetic particle absorption signatures to detect planetary rings and satellites, and carried out a multi-decade program of cosmic ray observations that established the radial gradient of galactic cosmic ray intensity from 1 AU to beyond 65 AU in the heliosphere.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 1959), the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Van Allen received the National Medal of Science (1987), the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1989), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1978), and the Vannevar Bush Award (1991). Time magazine named him one of its Men of the Year in 1960. He led the scientific community in putting research instruments on space satellites and was a leading advocate for unmanned planetary exploration, chairing the Outer Space Panel that developed the scientific rationale for the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 missions to the outer planets. He was also an outspoken critic of human spaceflight programs, arguing that robotic spacecraft yielded far greater scientific returns per dollar spent.