LET SPACECRAFT GO WITHOUT ME, EARTHBOUND DISCOVERER SAYS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 31, 1993                   TAG: 9301310032
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA.                                LENGTH: Medium
LET SPACECRAFT GO WITHOUT ME, EARTHBOUND DISCOVERER SAYS
Thirty-five years after discovering Earth's radiation belts, physicist James A. Van Allen still is exploring the heavens via unmanned spacecraft.
He's content being an armchair traveler.
"I have no interest whatever in being a passenger," the 78-year-old Van Allen said in a telephone interview last week from his office at the University of Iowa.
"It's a very hazardous undertaking, and I like it on Earth a lot better," he said. "I think the Earth is a vastly more interesting place than any of the other planets."
Besides, humans are a nuisance in space, Van Allen said.
"Some geologists will disagree with me. But if you're on the ground, you can do more perceptive observations," he said.
Van Allen has served as a principal investigator on 24 unmanned space missions. His most memorable mission was America's first - Explorer 1. Data it collected enabled Van Allen to discover bands of intense radiation surrounding Earth. They became the Van Allen radiation belts.
He was instrumental in charting radiation belts around Jupiter with Pioneer 10 and around Saturn with Pioneer 11.
"The whole composite picture is very gratifying to me," he said. "The Earth is only one case. But that was the first and the most exciting."
Van Allen still gets data from his instruments on Pioneers 10 and 11, which were launched by NASA in the early 1970s and have since left the solar system.
Pioneer 10 is now more than 5.2 billion miles from Earth, farther than any other human-made object.
"It's good, solid data. But it's not exciting on a daily level," Van Allen said. "It's a different kind of regime than having an encounter with a planet, which is a very exciting business."
The professor emeritus of physics is down to 40-hour workweeks, although he pushed himself hard recently to finish his latest astronomy book.
Van Allen took only one astronomy course in his life, back in the 1930s. "I mostly learned about it myself," he said.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB