A Small Pathbreaking Spacecraft: Giants of Space Research (Bernard Blake, Dieter Hovestadt, and Edward Stone)

Abstract The Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric Explorer (SAMPEX) mission launched in July 1992 was the first NASA “Small Explorer” project. It had the goal to show how space missions could be developed much more rapidly than had become the situation in the 1980s and 1990s. The program showed that outstanding research could be done from small spacecraft platforms and could be done with a minimum of bureaucratic paperwork. SAMPEX brought together researchers from the solar, cosmic ray, magnetospheric, and atmospheric disciplines to accomplish a comprehensive sweep of research objectives with a small satellite. In many ways, SAMPEX played a major role in bringing on the “New Space” revolution that has transformed space exploration and scientific research in space. It is defensible to say that SAMPEX led to a rebirth of radiation belt science. This article speaks about the seminal roles of Edward Stone, Dieter Hovestadt, and J. Bernard Blake in the SAMPEX program. They were at the nucleus of a much larger team of researchers at the U. of Maryland, the U. of Colorado, Aerospace Corp., the Max Planck Institute, Caltech, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Langley Research Center, and many other institutions. Many dozens of students were trained under the SAMPEX umbrella and research with the SAMPEX data continues to this day. It is fair to say that SAMPEX in many ways exemplified AGU's motto of unselfish cooperation in research. It certainly attained something that AGU seeks to do by getting space physics, atmospheric science, astrophysics, and solar researchers to cooperate actively. SAMPEX showed that big science could be done with small missions.