Samuel J. Bame, Jr.

Samuel J. Bame, Jr., one of the early pioneers in space physics, passed away December 14, 2014, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sam was born January 12, 1924, in Lexington, North Carolina. As a youth he was fascinated by science, particularly astronomy. He began his college education at Catawba College before entering the Army in 1943. His aptitude in physics led to his selection for the Army Specialized Training Program at Penn State in 1943-44, and he served in the Proximity Fuse Program and Ordnance Technical Intelligence in the United States, Philippines, and Japan in 1945-46. After the war he earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of North Carolina and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in nuclear physics from Rice University in 1951.

During his time at Rice, Sam won a Humble Oil Fellowship that allowed him to spend a summer internship at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. After graduation he joined the scientific staff at Los Alamos, where he spent his entire professional career. His early years there were devoted to low-energy nuclear physics, but he shifted to space physics as the space age began. During his 40-year career at Los Alamos, he served as principal investigator for more than 60 neutron and plasma experiments that he conceived, designed and implemented and that were flown in space. In the first successful flight of NASA’s Scout rocket program, Sam made measurements of the relatively low energy protons trapped in the outer Van Allen radiation belt, and in a series of 3 rocket flights from 1959 to 1961 he made some of the first measurements of the neutron spectrum and neutron albedo above the atmosphere. The neutron detectors he developed for the Vela and follow-on satellite programs have provided continuous, critical monitoring support for the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty since 1963.

Beginning with the Vela program, Sam emerged as one of the space community’s most successful, innovative, and prolific space plasma experimenters. Utilizing various types of spherical section electrostatic analyzers, his plasma experiments were flown on the Vela -2, -3, -4, -5, -6 satellites, on the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) -6, -7, -8 satellites, on the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE) -1, -2, -3 satellites, on Ulysses and the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), and on a series of 8 geosynchronous satellites (which have now returned over 82 satellite-years of data).

Sam’s experiments led to numerous fundamental discoveries about space plasmas. These include discovery of the plasma sheet and plasmoids in the geomagnetic tail; magnetic reconnection at Earth’s magnetopause and in the solar wind; heavy ions, non-Maxwellian structure in velocity distributions, thermal anisotropies, double ion beams, and coronal mass ejections in the solar wind as well as the three-dimensional structure of the wind and its temporal and spatial evolution; mechanisms of ion and electron heating at Earth’s collisionless bow shock; and numerous quantitative characterizations of magnetospheric structure and dynamics at geosynchronous orbit.

He was a mentor and an inspiration to younger scientists such as the four of us, whose careers were launched and sustained by the rich data sets his instruments returned. The knowledge, skill, and care he brought to his work have left a truly rich legacy. One of us (DMc) recalls learning about the design and development of flight hardware as a young physicist with an undergraduate degree from MIT by having his desk located in Sam’s lab. It was a true apprenticeship, similar to that of an aspiring young learner moving into the master’s workshop to learn a craft. Sam’s attention to the careful design of his instruments taught us the utility and fundamental need for controlling and measuring, where possible, all backgrounds that affected the data. He promoted an open scientific environment that often led to lengthy, animated discussions of fundamental scientific questions raised by the data from his instruments. The resulting “chatter” in the halls was a distinguishing and vital trait of the space plasma team at Los Alamos.

Sam served on a number of advisory groups for NASA over the years, was a Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the American Geophysical Union, and authored over 400 scientific papers.

He was preceded in death by his wife of 44 years and is survived by his three daughters and four grandchildren. Sam will be very sorely missed by his many friends and colleagues.

Submitted by Bill Feldman, Jack Gosling, Dave McComas, and Michelle Thomsen