Biographical Memoirs Volume 87 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Joseph W. Chamberlain
Joseph W. Chamberlain
Pages 130-149
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photo Observatory National Peak Kitt
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From page 131... ...
His first job after obtaining his doctorate was at the Air Force Cambridge Research center and involved the study of the Earth's upper atmosphere through spectroscopic observations of the aurora and the faint emissions from the night sky, called airglow. Interpretations of these data led to studies of the upper atmosphere from which they came, and then led to work on the interplanetary medium and the atmospheres of the other planets.
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He was married just before entering that university, on September 10, 1949, to Marilyn Jean Roesler, daughter of a Milwaukee dentist, whom he had met two years previously, when she attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. His research professor and thesis advisor was Lawrence Aller, and the chairman of the department, Leo Goldberg, was also an exemplary instructor and advisor.
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Chamberlain went to work with the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, Geophysics Research Directorate, in the Boston area, in December 1951, about six months before actually receiving his Ph.D. Much of the writing of the thesis and final analysis of results were done while he lived in Brookline.
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From page 134... ...
When he later expressed a desire to work with Meinel, it was arranged by Oliver that, starting in July 1953, he would spend some six months with him at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. At the end of the six months, Meinel offered him a job working on the contract that he had previously monitored, and he accepted with alacrity, remaining then at Yerkes for nine productive and enjoyable years.
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Nidey, the systems manager of the Space Division at KPNO. The principal staff members who joined him in Tucson were Lloyd Wallace, from Yerkes Observatory, who became the principal experimenter in the development of the rocket astronomy program and the author of this memoir, who came from the University of Saskatchewan to take charge of the program in laboratory astrophysics.
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From page 136... ...
The functions of the other two, the Stellar Division and the Solar Division, were to build telescopes and other equipment and to provide observing time for university astronomers. The Space Division existed because Aden Meinel, the first director of KPNO, began the development of a remotely controlled telescope with the objective of learning how to control a telescope in Earth orbit.
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The major scientific interests in the division had become purely planetary, without justification of space technology. Hunten and Michael Belton increased their observing programs of the planets with the McMath solar telescope on Kitt Peak.
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In 1967 a small group of planetary astronomers led by Carl Sagan petitioned the American Astronomical Society to form a division for planetary astronomy. There was a precedent in that solar astronomers had recently formed such a group.
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Within a few months Chamberlain had removed the worst of the troublemakers, put out a brochure describing LSI and the resources it could provide university scientists, and organized half a dozen conferences in the manner of the Arizona conferences on different topics. The LSI also managed the review of NASA proposals for the analysis of lunar samples.
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The current chairman was Ronald Stebbings, whom Chamberlain had earlier tried to hire at KPNO to start a new scientific division in laboratory astrophysics. (Lacking enthusiastic support from the director and the AURA board he called Stebbings in London and told him the job was approved but the outlook for an expanded laboratory of the scale we both envisioned did not look good.
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The problem was to use the profiles seen in the magnetic zenith, the profile from the magnetic horizon, and the distribution of auroral luminosity with height to extract a self-consistent description of the energies and angular distribution of the primary auroral protons. The principal result was that the bombarding protons had to have a wide dispersion in their initial velocities.
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From page 142... ...
, the forbidden oxygen red lines excited by electron impact, and also applied the theory to comets. Energy Deposition by Bombarding Auroral Electrons.
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The analysis indicated also the fraction of the incident electrons that would be reflected by the atmosphere and produce auroral emission in the opposite hemisphere, which was a new concept at the time. The basic equations, which are somewhat like radiative transfer equations with the added complication that the velocity of the particle varies, had been developed earlier by Harold Lewis, who was concerned with the bombardment of tissues by beta-decay electrons.
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From page 144... ...
Chamberlain's interest in this topic was due to the implications of Parker's results to the escape of planetary atmospheres. He found that Parker's solution, if taken literally and applied to the Earth's upper atmosphere, would have produced a rate of escape of the terrestrial atmospheric gases far exceeding what was predicted by kinetic theory.
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From page 145... ...
In 1956 he first showed that the variation in the strength of absorption lines in an optically thick, homogeneous planetary atmosphere increased from the crescent phase toward full phase, which is opposite to the trend for optically thin atmospheres, such as Mars's and Earth's. Observations by Kuiper analyzed in the same paper showed the absorptions by CO2 in the Venus atmosphere to behave in just this fashion.
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In 1977 he made the first proposal for a physical mechanism that could connect variations in the sun's magnetic field to terrestrial climate. On the one hand there had been observational evidence linking sunspot activity and cosmic ray bombardment to historic climatic changes.
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Resonance scattering by atmospheric sodium.
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I Hydrogen radiation in the night sky.
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J O S E P H W . C H A M B E R L A I N 149 1978 Theory of Planetary Atmospheres.
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