Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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FRED LAWRENCE WHIPPLE
FRED LAWRENCE WHIPPLE
Pages 392-414
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From page 393... ...
as a postdoctoral fellow. At that time he was busy organizing the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)
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Looking down into the yard, we saw a lovely rose garden tended by Fred. Talk on those evenings involved astronomy, politics, psychology, and of course, our children.
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Fred biked to work six days a week throughout the year, rain or shine. The round trip was 5 miles on busy streets, but Fred kept biking into his nineties.
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From page 396... ...
In his published interview with Ursala Marvin, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, he was reminded that in the year 2000 he had been named a "living legend" by the Library of Congress. Fred's comment was, "I don't feel very legendary, but I am pleased to be still living."2 Although he was intolerant of persiflage and would dismiss it with a wave of the hand, he chatted easily with everybody, earning the respect of the entire staff of SAO.
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From page 397... ...
He was successful in this search, finding six new comets, for each of which he was awarded the Donahoe Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In this period he was aware of the claim of Ernst Öpik, a famous Estonian astronomer whom Fred admired greatly, that contrary to common opinion not all meteors follow closed orbits around the Sun.
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From page 398... ...
A very useful result of the meteor project was a table of the density of Earth's atmosphere at altitudes above 100 kilometers, data hard to obtain by other methods. Fred harbored the hope of measuring the track of a meteorite, that is, a solid body large enough to survive entry into the atmosphere and reach the ground intact (known as a "fall")
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From page 399... ...
In 1952 a series of articles originally printed in Collier's magazine were published as a book, Across the Space Frontier.6 With articles by Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley, this book served to inform the public about the possibilities of science in space. Fred authored a chapter titled "The Heavens Open," which described how telescopes in Earth orbit could open the whole electromagnetic spectrum to observation, including ultraviolet radiation, X rays, and gamma rays.
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From page 400... ...
In 1986 mankind got its first look at the nucleus of a comet when Halley's comet approached the Sun. The European Giotto mission to Halley's comet found that its size, composition, and surface properties agreed with Fred's 1950 model.8 In paper II of the series Fred compared his model with what he and others had learned about meteor streams associated with the tails of known comets.
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From page 401... ...
"10 Fred was both an observational astronomer and a theorist, a rare combination nowadays. As time went on, he spent less time at the telescope and in the Harvard Collection of Astronomical Photographs, and more time analyzing data and proposing and testing theoretical models.
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From page 402... ...
NASA's contractor at Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, initiated unmanned missions to the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and later to the outer planets, and still later to comets and asteroids. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that this activity would be a boon to Solar System science.
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From page 403... ...
I believe with Fred that the study of a comet sample in the laboratory is of greatest importance.14 THE ADMINISTRATOR Many astronomers probably knew of Fred as the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. How did it come about that SAO is collocated with Harvard College Observatory?
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From page 404... ...
When he proposed this to his HCO colleagues, including Fred Whipple, they responded enthusiastically. In 1955 Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution signed an agreement to move SAO to Cambridge, and Fred was appointed director of SAO, a federal civil service position, while remaining a Harvard professor.
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From page 405... ...
In 1970 Fred also built a 1.5 meter optical telescope on Mount Hopkins in collaboration with the University of Arizona. This telescope was used to conduct the first major red shift survey of galaxies in 1983.17 The observed red shifts of galaxies were used with Hubble's law of the expansion of the universe to find the galaxies' positions in three dimensions.
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From page 406... ...
His thesis on variable stars was supervised by Donald Menzel, who at the time was an astrophysicist on the staff of the Lick Observatory of the University of California, and
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His professional societies included the American Astronomical Society, of which he served as vice-president from 1948 to 1950, the American Astronautical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astro
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Kennedy, the NASA Public Service Award, the Leonard Medal of the Meteoritical Society, the Kepler Medal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Joseph Henry Medal of the Smithsonian Institution, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Kuiper Award of the American Astronomical Society, the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society, and finally, the establishment of the Fred L Whipple Lectureship of the Planetary Division of the American Geophysical Union.
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From page 409... ...
Whipple; as indicated in Note 9, this wish has already been granted, although Fred did not live to see the sample returned from Comet Wild 2 by NASA's Stardust mission. The crystalline nature of Stardust particles suggests to some that these particles cannot be unprocessed interstellar dust, as might be expected if Comet Wild 2 formed in the cold outer reaches of the solar system.
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Oral histories in meteoritics and planetary science.
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Harvard College Obs.
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Washington, DC: NASA Scientific and Technical Informa tion Division. On the satellite geodesy program at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
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From page 413... ...
9-23.San Antonio, TX: Brooks Air Force Base. 1972 The origin of comets.
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