My hurried move back to Iowa City

As mentioned earlier, because of the demands of the new IGY Heavy Payload instru­ment development, and so that I could join in the task of processing and analyzing the Explorer I and III data, Van Allen and I agreed that I should return to the Iowa campus as quickly as possible. Adding to the urgency of my return was the grow­ing possibility that an additional project (beyond the IGY Heavy Payload) might be approved and would also have to be conducted on a crash basis. In fact, that project did quickly materialize, culminating in the launch of Explorer IV and the Explorer V launch attempt, as described in Chapter 13.

Upon reaching Pasadena from my Iowa City stopover, I found that Rosalie had everything under control, and two-week-old George was thriving. The week was completely consumed, on the home front, by preparations for our move back to Iowa City and, at the laboratory, on program planning and detailed design work for the Juno II instrument. Rosalie carried most of the burden of preparing the household for the move, closing all of our bank and utility accounts, terminating our house contract, taking Barbara out of school (again), and packing our personal belongings.

My primary occupation during that week was to design the electrical and mechani­cal configuration of our IGY Heavy Payload instrument and to order its GM counters. I also spent time collaborating with other experimenters and engineers on the new project, including Vernon (Vern) Suomi at the University of Wisconsin, Mr. Hanson, who worked for Gerhardt Groetzinger at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies, and H. Burke at Huntsville.

I also completed the steps necessary to terminate my active employment at JPL. Following their suggestion, I remained an inactive and unpaid member of the JPL staff. That was intended to make it easy for me to return there for postgraduation

FIGURE 12.4 The author preparing the spare Explorer I satellite for the move back to Iowa City.

It, along with all University of Iowa laboratory equipment and our personal effects, was loaded into a U-Haul trailer and pulled behind our Mercury for the drive home. The scene is at the rear of our temporary residence on Claremont Street in Pasadena.

employment, if that should be my desire. It gave me a prearranged employment option more than two years before I received my Ph. D. degree. As it developed, I accepted postgraduation employment at the newly forming NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the staff arrangement with JPL, for which I was very grateful, was eventually terminated.

My return to Iowa posed an interesting problem. I was going off the JPL payroll, and they had no obligation to pay for my return move. As SUI had had no financial involvement in my original move west in November, and since they were simply resuming my previous employment at Iowa City, they had no legal obligation to help in moving my family and household possessions back. Fortunately, since I was transporting all of our laboratory equipment, parts, supplies, and spare Explorer I and III satellite payloads back to Iowa, Van Allen felt justified in paying for my own direct transportation expenses. He also adjusted my salary for the next few months to help compensate me for flying Rosalie and the three children back.

Rosalie’s return airline flight with Barbara, Sharon, and two-week-old George on Saturday, 5 April, was as uneventful as one might hope under the circumstances, as they were able to take a direct flight from Los Angeles to Cedar Rapids, only 30 miles from Iowa City. My parents picked them up at the airport and delivered them to our Rochester Avenue home.

To keep the expense of the move as low as possible, I rented a U-Haul trailer to transport the laboratory equipment, spare Explorer I and III units (Figure 12.4), and our personal effects. I left Pasadena on Monday, driving our Mercury sedan and the rented trailer via a southern route through Arizona, Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the new Kansas turnpike to avoid the possibility of lingering harsh winter weather

OPENING SPACE RESEARCH

in the high Rockies farther north. I arrived in Iowa City on Friday, 11 April, after a very pleasant solo drive. My journal reported of the trip, “No bad weather, beautiful scenery.”

As I drove into Iowa City, events at the cosmic ray laboratory were unfolding at a feverish pace. The IGY was in full swing. Van Allen and our small cluster of students, faculty, and staff were hard at work on an energetic balloon, rocket, rockoon, and satellite IGY research program.

There was great public and scientific excitement about the burgeoning space pro­gram, especially after the national humiliation of losing the distinction of being first in space to the Soviets. Pressures were mounting for capitalizing on the early U. S. successes as quickly as possible with follow-on space programs.

That Saturday, 12 April, Van Allen, McIlwain, and Ray brought me up to date on the current situation. The satellite instruments on both Explorers I and III had been working flawlessly and were providing a growing tide of data. Explorer I had reached the end of its operating life, and its ground station recordings were being converted on a routine basis to strip chart records and columns of numbers. Explorer III was working well, a reasonable rate of successful interrogations was being achieved, and the first data recordings were reaching us. The account of that Saturday meeting, as recorded in my personal journal several days after the fact, contains the following paragraph:

By now a very startling and interesting result has appeared in the data. We have encountered some extremely high counting rates at the higher altitudes, and at perhaps all latitudes within north and south 33 degrees. Present thinking is that they may be due to electron clouds. Counting rates are probably over 4000 per second. This result appears on both Explorers, and there seems to be no doubt as to its existence.33

We decided at that meeting to change our Juno II heavy payload counter configuration to allow us to study the new phenomenon with greater discrimination.

During late March and early April, Van Allen, with active involvement by Carl McIlwain, continued discussions with Wolfgang Panofsky that had begun at the 11­12 March meeting at JPL. A satellite was being considered that would have detectors arranged to make more quantitative measurements, both of the natural radiation that we were observing and of charged particles that might be injected into trapped trajectories by a high-altitude nuclear burst—what came to be known as Project Argus.

A few days before our 12 April get-together, Van Allen conveyed our growing belief in the existence of the high-intensity radiation regions to Panofsky. That was the first revelation of the new discovery to anyone outside our small group of four.

CHAPTER 12 • DISCOVERY OF THE TRAPPED RADIATION 339

That letter and its background and implications are discussed further in the next chapter.

Van Allen was sufficiently confident in our conclusions by mid-April that he discussed them with several IGY program officials, namely, Richard Porter, Hugh Odishaw, Homer Newell, and William Pickering.34 Those calls were made, most likely, on Monday, 14 April.

The U. S. National Committee had recently established a policy for the release of scientific information derived from U. S. satellites in the IGY program.35 It provided that all satellite-derived data should be conveyed to the U. S. National Committee in advance of any public release. Odishaw reminded Van Allen of that policy and admonished him to make no public announcement of the new discovery until a formal IGY release could be arranged. The two agreed, during that conversation, on a release date of 1 May.