Introduction of the Banquet Speaker

The year was 1957. The Russians had just launched Sputnik I, “the first artificial satellite put into outer space. The US raced for an equalizer, sending up Vanguard in December 1957; but the satellite exploded after lift off” (¹). Two months later, February 1958, Explorer I was in space carrying a Geiger tube created by a young University of Iowa scientist named James Van Allen. The device became saturated with radiation leading to the discovery of the Van Allen Radiation Belt.

That year our speaker graduated from high school, won a model airplane competition and started as an engineering student at the University of Iowa. When he saw Van Allen's picture on the cover of Time Magazine, our speaker walked across the street from his electrical engineering lab to the Physics Building and asked Van Allen for a job. They must have wanted anyone who knew something about electronics, and he was hired right off the bat, to work on that stuff. In a few months he was down at Cape Canaveral working on real rockets. Some might say that the Van Allen Belt was “the greatest discovery of the space age” (²), because with it the US had caught up with the Russians.

Over the next 50 years Van Allen, our high school graduate and 3 other researchers built entire crafts or instruments for most major US space missions. This includes Explorer missions, several Pioneer missions, Cassini, Voyager 1 and 2, and The Mars Express, among many others. “Some people don’t realize that space science programs began right in our Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy. That was the beginning of the space age” (²).

The teenage boy who “traded his hobby of crafting model rockets to join a fledgling University of Iowa Space program” (¹) is now a world renowned space plasma physics scientist, who has participated in over 25 space craft projects, co-authored over 450 scientific publications, received medals from the International Scientific Radio Union, the American Geophysical Union, the European Geosciences Union and the Excellence in Plasma Physics Award from the American Physical Society. He has supervised 50 MS and PhD students, and has been elected to the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

While his intellect has been roaming in the cold darkness of outer space, fate has been good to him by exposing him to a much warmer and brilliant dimension of life with a wife, Marie, who has been a warm and caring nurse, and a daughter Christine who is a brilliant Physician-Scientist. So, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Dr. Donald Gurnett, Van Allen Professor of Physics and Astronomy, to share with us his Search for Life in the Solar System and Beyond.