James Van Allan

James Van Allan was born in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa in 1914 . He attended the University of Iowa where he graduated with a doctorate degree in nuclear physics in 1939. He was the head of the Physical Department at then University of Iowa after he returned from WWII. At Iowa, he continued his experiments to see how things work. One way he would do this was by sending things up in the air and then make observations. He put a Geiger detector and a cosmic-ray experiment into the Explorer 1 in 1958. The information received from the Explorer showed the Earth has a radiation belt around it. This is now named the Van Allan belt. Later, he also studied 24 more satallites, including Pioneer 10 and 11. In 2006, James Van Allan died from heart failure. Many people believe NASA would not be the same without his discoveries.