Tag: Obituary

Dr. George Carruthers was an accomplished astrophysicist and engineer, with many contributions to astrophysics and planetary science, and one of only a few African Americans working in the early U.S. space program. He was the principal designer of an ultraviolet camera/spectrograph that went to the moon as part of NASA’s Apollo 16 mission in 1972, in an effort to examine Earth’s atmosphere and the composition of interstellar space, for which he was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. He continued his instrument development and science research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory through 2002, when he became a professor at Howard University. His accomplishments included development of an instrument with two far-UV cameras used on the STS-39 space shuttle mission, in 1991, and the first detection of molecular hydrogen in space, via a sounding rocket in 1970. Dr. Carruthers earned many awards for his work, including a National Medal of Technology and Innovation awarded by President Obama. Dr. Carruthers will be remembered as an amazing scientist, engineer, professor and mentor. In particular, he was highly engaged with the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP). He passed on December 26, 2020, at the age of 81.

Notice of Dr. Carruther’s passing from NSBP: https://nsbp.org/news/545345/Dr.-George-Carruthers-Passed-Away.htm
Notice of Dr. Carruther’s passing from NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/looking-back-dr-george-carruthers-and-apollo-16-far-ultraviolet-cameraspectrograph

Roger Jay Phillips, American geophysicist, planetary scientist and professor emeritus at the Washington University in St. Louis, passed away on November 19, 2020. Phillips served as the Director of the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) from 1979 to 1982.

Phillips received his Ph.D. in 1968 from the University of California, Berkeley. Following graduate school he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), before joining the staff of the LPI in 1979. In 1982, Phillips accepted a faculty position at Southern Methodist University, and in 1992 he moved to Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as a Professor and as Director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences. After retiring from Washington University, Phillips moved to Colorado, where he was affiliated with the Southwest Research Institute.

Over a career that spanned more than five decades, Phillips contributed broadly to our understanding of the geophysical structure and evolution of the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. He was the team leader for the Apollo Lunar Sounder Experiment, which flew on Apollo 17 and produced the first radar imaging of the lunar subsurface. Much later, he was team co-leader for the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that imaged the internal stratigraphy of martian polar layered deposits. He also played key roles on the science teams for the Magellan mission to Venus, the Mars Global Surveyor mission, the MESSENGER mission to orbit Mercury, and the GRAIL mission to the Moon.

Phillips is well known for his contributions to understanding the impact crater distribution and resurfacing history of Venus, as well as the geodynamical evolution of that planet’s mantle and crust. He demonstrated that growth of the huge Tharsis volcanic province on Mars shaped the entire planet and influenced the distribution and direction of martian valley networks. From radar sounding and laser altimetry, he showed that the lithosphere of the martian polar regions is minimally deflected by the substantial load of the polar deposits, a condition indicative of a large lithosphere thickness or a long-term transient mantle response to loading.

A fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Phillips received the 2003 G. K. Gilbert Award from the Geological Society of America. He was also honored with the Whipple Award from the American Geophysical Union in 2008. Among his many contributions to the scientific literature, Phillips served as an editor of Geophysical Research Letters and co-edited the books: Basaltic Volcanism on the Terrestrial Planets, Origin of the Moon, and Venus II.

One of the giants of planetary science, H. J. Melosh, died unexpectedly on 11 September 2020 at age 73. Through his students, postdocs and collaborators, he brought a high level of physical rigour to the growing field of planetary geology.

Jay Melosh was in many ways a maverick. Born Henry J. Melosh IV in New Jersey, Jay would have none of it, and was always simply ‘Jay’ to everyone. He did follow family tradition in being a ‘Princeton man’, but majored in physics (graduating in 1969), which led to a PhD under Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech only three years later. His 1974 thesis publication on the relation between current and constituent quarks1 is still cited in terms of the ‘Melosh transformation’. But his next publication, in 1975, concerned mass concentrations (mascons) and the orientation of the Moon2, for Jay’s true passion turned out to be geology, and planetary geology in particular. He was immersed in the planetary science discipline that was emerging at Caltech, and returned there after postdoctoral stints at CERN (the European Centre for Particle Physics) and the University of Chicago, rising to the rank of associate professor. After three years on the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1982 Jay settled in for a long and productive middle career at the University of Arizona where he held joint appointments in the Planetary Sciences and Geosciences departments, becoming an Arizona Regents Professor in 2004.

For full obituary, please go to: H.J. Melosh

York University Professor Emeritus John Caldwell died on Dec. 12, 2019 at the age of 75 after a lengthy illness. Caldwell was a professor of astronomy, with expertise in space and planetary astronomy and extra-solar planets, in the Faculty of Science.

Caldwell came to York in 1986 after serving in the Royal Canadian Navy, and earning a PhD in astronomy from the University of Madison (Wisconsin). During his career, he also taught at Princeton University and State University of NY at Stony Brook.

He was well known for his extensive collaborations with NASA’s Ames Research Centre, where he worked with a team of scientists to develop the Kepler mission to discover Earth-like planets around other stars. He also made observations of Mars with the Hubble Space Telescope and focussed efforts on searching for possible volcanic emissions with his students and collaborators.

He is also remembered for his passion for softball, and playing on campus during the summer months with grad students.

John achieved great professional success and was highly respected in his field. Raising his three children, as he would say, was his greatest accomplishment and spending time with his children and grandchildren was his favourite thing to do.

He leaves behind his daughter, Devon (Neil), and his sons, David (Lisa) and Garrett (Candice). He was the adored “Du” of nine grandchildren: Tim (Salina), Bryanna, Madison, Abigail, Sophia, Riley, James, Reagen and Emma. He will be missed by his twin sister, Joan, and her family.

Adapted from the full obituary at: https://yfile.news.yorku.ca/2019/12/18/passings-professor-emeritus-john-caldwell/

Nadine Gail Barlow passed away on August 17, 2020. Over 18 years at Northern Arizona University, Nadine ascended the academic ranks, becoming Department Chair of Astronomy and Planetary Science. She received numerous awards for teaching excellence. Doubling the size of the Department, she grew its curriculum into a Ph.D.-granting program. Nadine supervised many undergraduate and graduate students, and was a popular mentor and friend to those under her tutelage. A prize for Undergraduate Research Excellence is being established in her name. Academic outreach was a priority, bringing the Arizona Space Grant Program to NAU, and fostering cooperation between NAU, Lowell Observatory, and the USGS. Nadine specialized in impact cratering processes across the Solar System. Almost on a dare, she mapped, measured, and classified every crater on Mars larger than 8 km in diameter for her Ph.D. dissertation. These data were used to establish the detailed relative chronology of Martian geologic features. Throughout her career, she expanded this database, as later spacecraft missions returned increasingly detailed images of Mars. The IAU named asteroid 15466 Barlow in her honor.

Nadine is missed by family and many lifelong friends.

Bob Marcialis, Faith Vilas, Lisa Prato, Lynn Hayden

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our colleague Michael I. Mishchenko.  Dr. Michael Mishchenko was a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and received his PhD (with honors) and Habilitation Doctoral degrees in physics from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU). He worked at the Main Astronomical Observatory in Kiev (1987-1992) and then joined the research staff of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Michael’s research interests included electromagnetic scattering by morphologically complex particles and particle groups, polarimetry, aerosol and cloud remote sensing, and ocean optics.

One of Michael’s principal accomplishments was his development of efficient T-matrix methods to enable numerically exact computer calculations of scattering and absorption by complex dispersions of randomly and preferentially oriented atmospheric particulates. T-matrix techniques are based on direct solutions of the Maxwell equations. The resulting computer programs work for morphologically complex particles with large size parameters, with benchmark accuracy over their range of applicability. Michael’s T-matrix computer programs have been publicly available on-line since 1997, and have been used in more than 1450 peer-reviewed publications. Michael himself used T-matrix methods in pioneering studies of the effects of morphological particle complexities on the radiative, polarization, and depolarization properties of mineral aerosols, fractal-soot and soot-containing aerosols, soot-contaminated cloud droplets, contrail particles, and polar stratospheric and noctilucent clouds.

Beyond scattering by single particles Michael derived the general theory of radiative transfer in particulate media directly from the Maxwell equations, an accomplishment that had eluded scientists for over a century. This microphysical derivation established the existence of a fundamental link between electromagnetics, radiative transfer, and coherent backscattering, defined the formal conditions of applicability of the radiative transfer equation, and clarified the physical nature of measurements taken with directional radiometers. It also identified and dispelled misconceptions inherent in conventional phenomenological radiometry and radiative transfer theory. As a result of Michael’s work, the disciplines of radiative transfer and directional radiometry are now legitimate branches of physical optics.

While Michael was a consummate theoretician he also managed the NASA/GEWEX Global Aerosol Climatology Project developing an innovative algorithm to infer aerosol properties from multi-channel ISCCP radiance data and compiling the first global satellite climatology of aerosol optical thickness and size for the full period of satellite observations.  Building on this work Michael’s seminal sensitivity analysis of passive algorithms for the retrieval of aerosol properties from space using radiance and polarization data was instrumental in the development of the NASA Glory Space Mission for which Michael served as Project Scientist.

Dr. Mishchenko published 7 monographs, 23 peer-reviewed book chapters, and some 300 journal papers. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer and of Physics Open. He previously served as Topical Editor on scattering and meteorological optics for Applied Optics and was an editorial board member for several other scholarly journals.

An elected Fellow of AGU, OSA, AMS, IoP (UK), and the Electromagnetics Academy, Dr. Mishchenko was the recipient of numerous professional awards including the AMS Henry G. Houghton Award, Hendrik C. van de Hulst Award from Elsevier, and two NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medals. The International Astronomical Union honored Michael by giving Asteroid 22686 (1998 QL53) the name “Mishchenko”.Michael passed away on July 21, 2020.  His loss and his legacy are enormous.

Andy Lacis, Larry Travis, Barbara Carlson, and Brian Cairns

NASA GISS, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025

The British-American astronomer Margaret Burbidge passed away on 5 April 2020 at the age of 100. She was the principal author of a watershed scientific paper in 1957 that set out the evidence for chemical elements having been formed inside stars. The 100-page paper was titled “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars” and was published in Reviews of Modern Physics. Burbidge was the first author, together with her collaborators, her husband, Geoffrey Burbidge, William A. Fowler and Fred Hoyle; the paper became known as B2FH, from the first letters of its authors’ surnames.

Born in Stockport, Greater Manchester, she studied astronomy, physics and mathematics at University College London and graduated with first class honors in 1939 just as WWII was looming. She worked at the University of London’s Mill Hill observatory, where her  observing logs indicated that she sometimes had to realign the telescope because of nearby  explosions from German V1 flying bombs.

She earned a PhD from University College London in 1943, and as WWII was ending, she applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mount Wilson observatory in Los Angeles.  Drawn by the sheer size of the telescopes being built in the US, she was turned down because she was a woman and would have had to spend nights at the observatory with married men. Writing in 1994, she recalled that this rejection opened her eyes to gender- based discrimination, “A guiding operational principle in my life was activated: If frustrated in one’s endeavor by a stone wall or any kind of blockage, one must find a way around it — another route towards one’s goal. This is advice I have given to many women facing similar situations.”

Remaining in Britain, she met Geoffrey Burbidge, a theoretical physicist at UCL, in late 1947, and six months later they were married. Her enthusiasm for the universe persuaded him to turn his talents to astrophysics too. She finally made it to the US in 1951 with a position at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes observatory in Wisconsin. Although she would occasionally return to the UK over the coming decades, she made the US her home and became a US citizen in 1977.

In 1962 the Burbidges became professors at the UC San Diego, and a decade later she returned to the UK to become director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Until then the post had carried with it the title of Astronomer Royal. However, she was not conferred this honor, breaking more than 300 years of tradition, something she would sometimes put down to politics and sometimes to sexism.

In the same year she took a stand against the AAS by refusing to accept its Annie Jump Cannon award, given for distinguished contributions to astronomy by women. Her reason was that it was only awarded to female astronomers, and in her letter to the committee she explained that “it is high time that discrimination in favor of, as well as against, women in  professional life be removed”.

In response, the AAS convened a working group to investigate the status of women in astronomy. In 1974 she returned to the US, and two years later was elected the first female  president of the AAS. In the subsequent decades she worked across many areas of astrophysics, and helped to develop the Faint Object Spectrograph, one of the original  instruments on HST.

She retired in 1988, and subsequently became professor emeritus. In 2005 she and her husband were jointly awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Geoffrey died in 2010. Margaret is survived by their daughter, Sarah, and a grandson, Conner.

Adapted from the full obituary at:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/22/margaret-burbidge obituary?CMP=share_btn_link

Photo credit: UC San Diego Library