Aden Meinel
Aden Baker Meinel ( born November 25, 1922 in Pasadena, California, † October 3, 2011 in Nevada) was an American astronomer who is best known for his role in the design and construction of large telescopes and observation instruments.
Life
Aden Meinel was the son of German -born immigrant John Meinel and Meinel and Gertrude had two brothers. 1944 married Aden Meinel the Professor Marjorie Meinel, daughter of Edison Pettit. From the marriage seven children were born, including Carolyn P. Meinel.
Meinel studied at Caltech (BA 1943, MA 1944) and gained knowledge in optics in the optical workshop of the Mount Wilson Observatory. During the Second World War he was a soldier in Europe. He received his doctoral degree in 1949 at the University of California, Berkeley with the construction of a spectrograph and a work based on it about A spectrographic study of the night sky and the Northern Lights in the near infrared, but he discovered named after him bands of the hydroxyl radical in the night sky spectrum. Until 1956 he was a staff member and associate professor at the University of Chicago and deputy director of the Yerkes Observatory and McDonald Observatory.
Meinel was involved in site selection and construction of the Kitt Peak National Observatory and its first director until 1961. Afterwards, he was director of the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona and founded there in 1964, the Center for Optics sciences. In this period also saw the construction of the innovative Multiple Mirror Telescope. In addition to his astronomical projects, he also developed sensor systems for ground-based and space-based monitoring tasks of the U.S. Air Force.
In the 1980s, he went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and worked with his wife on concepts for new space telescopes, 1993, both retired there. Another area of interest of both Meinel was the sun's energy.