Fred Lawrence Whipple
Fred Lawrence Whipple ( born November 5, 1906 in Red Oak / Iowa; † August 30, 2004 in Cambridge / Massachusetts ) was an American astronomer.
Life
Whipple grew up on a farm in Iowa, until his family moved to Los Angeles. He came to college, had a job besides the grocery store of his father, where he advised clients in the head and at the same time mitrechnete subtotal their purchases. He had a penchant for numbers. His desire to become a tennis player, was not fulfilled because he contracted polio. He then studied mathematics and decided to become an astronomer.
Even as he earned his doctorate at Berkeley, he was involved in the calculation of the orbit of the newly discovered dwarf planet Pluto. Then he went to Harvard College Observatory ans, bent over thousands of photographic plates of images of the sky and focused on the exploration of comets and meteorites.
In 1933 he discovered the periodic comets and asteroids 36P/Whipple ( 1252) Celestia. In addition, he was co-discoverer discoverer or five non-periodic comet, C/1932 P1 including Peltier Whipple, which was discovered independently by the famous amateur astronomer Leslie Copus Peltier.
During the Second World War he developed for the Harvard Radio Research Laboratories aluminum reflectors to the disturbance German radar systems. Whipple is best known for his revolutionary contribution to the study of comets - the concept of "dirty snowballs " for the composition of comets, which he proposed in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal, 1950. He originally used the term "icy conglomerate ".
In 1955 he became director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory ( SAO). Here he developed an optical tracking system for celestial bodies, a series of so-called Baker - Nunn cameras. After the surprising for the U.S. launch of the Russian Sputnik in October 1957, the manufacturer screwed in South Pasadena hastily the first camera together to create from this " marvel ".
Whipple refined observation techniques and equipment, working with photography and ballistics to calculate the speed of meteors. As SAO rose in 1973 in the Harvard - Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he conducted research on there. With 92 years " Dr. came Comet " for NASA's Comet Contour program. In summer 2002, the unmanned research unit took off. Whipple hoped to be 100 years old, to experience its planned 2006 meeting with the comet Schwassmann - guard 3 yet. Whipple calculated for the first time an accurate orbit of Pluto.
Honors
Works
- Dirty snowball wallpaper: Part I: ApJ 111 (1950) 375; Part II: ApJ 113 (1951) 464