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One September day in 2009, Greg Prickman, head of Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries, walked down into the basement of MacLean Hall, and into a dingy, poorly lit room that formerly housed the UI physics department’s particle accelerator. He was excited and anxious. This space once served as part of Van Allen’s laboratory. And Prickman had learned these rooms might just contain some key artifacts from the great space-scientist’s research.

And indeed they did. Row after row of slender boxes filled shelves that stretched to the ceiling. There were hundreds of such boxes. And each one housed an original reel-to-reel magnetic audio tape containing signals received and recorded from the Explorer satellite missions first launched in 1958.

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