Fred Lawrence Whipple

From Vero - Wikipedia
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Template:Short description Template:Use American English Template:Infobox scientist

Minor planets discovered: 1<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
1252 Celestia 19 February 1933 Template:Small
Comets discovered: 6
C/1932 P1Template:Ref label 6 August 1932
36P/Whipple 15 October 1933
C/1937 C1 7 February 1937
C/1940 O1Template:Ref label 8 August 1940
C/1942 C1Template:Ref label 25 January 1942
C/1942 X1Template:Ref label 8 December 1942
  1. Template:Note label with Leslie C. Peltier
  2. Template:Note label with John S. Paraskevopoulos
  3. Template:Note label with Giovanni Bernasconi and György Kulin
  4. Template:Note label with Carl Fedtke and G. A. Tevzadze

Fred Lawrence Whipple (November 5, 1906 – August 30, 2004) was an American astronomer, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory for more than 70 years. Among his achievements were asteroid and comet discoveries, the "dirty snowball" hypothesis of comets, and the invention of the Whipple shield.

Early life and education

Fred Lawrence Whipple was born on November 5, 1906, in Red Oak, Iowa. His parents were farmers. His father, Harry Lawrence Whipple, was of English ancestry; his mother, Celeste MacFarland Whipple, was of Scottish and Irish ancestry. Harry Whipple served as an elder in a Presbyterian church. Fred's younger brother died when he was four.<ref name=marsden>Template:Cite journal</ref> When Fred was 15, the family moved to Long Beach, California, where his father opened a grocery store.<ref name=marsden/><ref name=yeomans>Template:Cite journal</ref> An early bout with polio ended his ambition of being a professional tennis player.<ref name=marsden/><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Whipple studied at Occidental College in Southern California, but after one semester there he transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles where he majored in mathematics, graduating in 1927.<ref name=marsden/> Recollecting his path from mathematics to astronomy, Whipple stated in a 1978 autobiography that his "mathematics major veered [him] through physics and finally focused on astronomy where time, space, mathematics, and physics had a common meeting ground."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Whipple became bored with mathematics, and after taking a class in astronomy, taught by Frederick C. Leonard,<ref name=marsden/> he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley where he obtained a PhD in Astronomy in 1931, working in the Lick Observatory. He became interested in comet orbits calculations, which was a long and difficult process at the time. His first published result was the calculation of the 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann orbit.<ref name=marsden/> In 1930, he helped to map the orbit of the then newly discovered planet Pluto.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref name=yeomans/> Whipple's thesis was on the cepheid variables, titled A Spectrophotometric Study of the Cepheid Variables η Aquilae and δ Cephei. The measurements he got were 3 times larger than theoretically possible under the Cepheid period-luminosity law; Whipple concluded that the theory "had to be wrong". He didn't try to formulate new theory, he later said that it "simply disgusted him".<ref name=marsden/>

Career

Whipple joined Harvard College Observatory in 1931.<ref name=yeomans/> From 1950 until 1977 he was a professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, including being the Phillips Professor of Astronomy between 1968 and 1977, succeeding Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.<ref name=marsden/> In his early years in Harvard, Whipple was interested in galaxies, and soon published "color indices for 38 galaxies in the Coma-Virgo region, confirming an earlier suggestion that galaxies were redder than average stars of corresponding spectral type". He wanted to continue these studies, but the then director Harlow Shapley "did not welcome competition in galactic studies". Whipple published several articles together with Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in 1935 and with Jesse Greenstein in 1937. When Whipple read an article by Ernst Öpik on comets and meteors he became interested in determining meteor trajectories.<ref name=marsden/><ref name=astrog/> Whipple developed a "photographic tracking network"<ref name=yeomans/> to observe meteors in 1936-1937, which continued as the Harvard Photographic Meteor Program.<ref name=marsden/> In 1955, he established the Harvard Radio Meteor Project.<ref name=marsden/> In 1960s, he showed that most meteors originate within the Solar System rather than from interstellar space, and have comet-like trajectories.<ref name=yeomans/>

In 1933, Whipple discovered the periodic comet 36P/Whipple and the asteroid 1252 Celestia, which he named after his mother. The official Template:MoMP was mentioned in The Names of the Minor Planets by Paul Herget in 1955 (Template:Small).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He also discovered or co-discovered five other non-periodic comets, the first of which was C/1932 P1 Peltier-Whipple, while his last was C/1942 X1 (Whipple–Fedtke–Tevzadze).<ref name=astrog/> In 1939 he also discovered BT Mon, a ninth-magnitude nova "on a spectrum plate taken by Bart Bok".<ref name=marsden/>

During World War II, he invented a device for cutting aluminum tinfoil into chaff, a radar countermeasure;<ref name=bbc>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=yeomans/> his device "would turn 3 ounces of aluminum foil into 3000 half-wave dipoles, and he also found optimum aspect ratios for the foil strips that would work over a range of radar frequencies".<ref name=brownlee>Template:Cite journal</ref> Brian G. Marsden called the device "essentially a type of lawn mower".<ref name=marsden/> For this invention, Whipple was called the "Chief of Chaff",<ref name=brownlee/><ref name=bbc/> and was awarded a Certificate of Merit in 1948. In 1946, Whipple invented a "meteoroid bumper", now known as "Whipple shield", a device to protect spacecraft from impact by small particles by breaking them up, eleven years before the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into space.<ref name=yeomans/>

After the war, the US Army experimented with German V-2 rockets, inviting Whipple to take part in test flights from White Sands Missile Range. There, he befriended Wernher von Braun. Both men "promoted an understanding of space matters by the public", and wrote several popular articles about space exploration for the Collier's together.<ref name=space>Template:Cite journal</ref> One article was about a crewed flight to the Moon; by their estimates, it "could happen within 25 years". In another article Whipple proposed to put a telescope into space.<ref name=marsden/>

Halley's Comet at Giotto's closest approach, 1986

In 1950, Whipple wrote a series of influential papers entitled A Comet Model, published in the Astrophysical Journal,<ref name=brownlee/><ref name=economist>Template:Cite news</ref> <ref> Template:Cite journal</ref><ref> Template:Cite journal</ref><ref> Template:Cite journal</ref> where he proposed the "icy conglomerate" hypothesis of comet composition (later called the "dirty snowball" hypothesis). Criticized at first, the hypothesis was mostly confirmed when ESA's Giotto photographed the Halley's Comet in 1986.<ref name=guardian>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=nytimes/> Before Whipple, it was believed that comets "were balls of sand held together by gravity".<ref name=nytimes>Template:Cite web</ref> Whipple was best-known for his work on comets,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and was even nicknamed Dr. Comet by the press.<ref name=cnn>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Whipple's articles on comets were called "the most-cited works in the Astrophysical Journal during the past half century".<ref name=brownlee/> In 1986 he was one of the guests at the Space Research Institute during the Halley's comet Vega program flybys.<ref name=calder101>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 1954, Whipple was invited to participate in a meeting at the Office of Naval Research regarding the first US artificial satellite. After the meeting, Whipple became the head of Project Orbiter, which proposed to launch it in 1955. The project was not chosen for development; no satellite was launched in 1955.<ref name=marsden/><ref name=space/>

Whipple became director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in 1955, and remained in this post until 1973.<ref name=cfa/> During Whipple's directorship, Smithsonian and Harvard observatories merged into joint Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).<ref name=brownlee/> Whipple also chose Mount Hopkins as a site for the new telescope in collaboration with the University of Arizona. He also helped to design the new telescope, the Multiple Mirror Telescope, which became operational in 1979.<ref name=marsden/> In 1981, the observatory was renamed to Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in his honor.<ref name=cfa/>

Under a banner for Operation Moonwatch, people are lined up at the entrance to a Satellite Demonstration set up in Biloxi, Mississippi, 1958.

In preparation for the International Geophysical Year, Whipple organized a SAO network of widefield Baker-Nunn cameras with the goal of precise tracking of satellites "with the intention of improving the global geodetic uncertainty from hundreds of meters to 10 meters". As a backup, Whipple also organized a network of amateur astronomers, called Operation Moonwatch; it was the only group able to track Sputnik. There were more than 200 groups in several countries; several of them operated until 1970s.<ref name=marsden/> The SAO network "proved so successful that the precision tracking of these satellites could be used to model the Earth's shape and density variations from the observed gravitational effects upon these satellite orbits."<ref name=yeomans/>

In 1968, Whipple became the principal investigator of the Project Celescope on the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, the first successful space telescope.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1999, Whipple became the oldest scientist involved in a NASA project, working on the CONTOUR mission to a comet, led by his former student Joseph Veverka.<ref name=cnn/>

Marsden writes that in the 1960s Whipple became interested "in the idea that compositional similarities suggested that Uranus and Neptune were largely formed from cometary material and that the Öpik‐Oort Cloud (as he always termed it) consisted of “cometesimals” thrown to great distances by planetary gravitational perturbations." He pursued this idea for several decades.<ref name=marsden/>

Personal life

Template:Quote box

Whipple was married twice. He married Dorothy Woods in 1928, with whom he had a son; they divorced in 1935. In 1946, he married Babette F. Samelson with whom he had two daughters.<ref name=yeomans/><ref name=astrog/> Born into a religious family, Whipple became an atheist later in life,<ref name=marsden/> but was fascinated with occult phenomena.<ref name=field/>

Whipple had two cars with plates COMETS and PLANET.<ref name=economist/><ref name=nytimes/> Until his 90s, he rode a bicycle to his office.<ref name=yeomans/> Whipple had an "outstanding collection of astronomical neckties",<ref name=brownlee/><ref name=field/> this collection is "on permanent display at the visitor center at the base of the impressively winding road that leads to Whipple Observatory".<ref name=brownlee/> He liked scuba diving. The family owned a house on Great Camanoe Island in the British Virgin Islands.<ref name=field/> He grew roses at their home in Belmont.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Whipple was also an artist; one of his interest was what he called a "stochastic painting":<ref name=marsden/>

Template:Quote

Whipple died on August 30, 2004, aged 97,<ref name=guardian/> in Cambridge, Massachusetts.<ref name=astrog>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Awards and honors

Fred Whipple, left, and Leonard Carmichael, seventh Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, when Whipple won the President's Award presented by John F. Kennedy, 1962

In 1963, Whipple was awarded with President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for his work on the satellite tracking network. Whipple later said that "I think that was my most exciting moment, when I was able to invite my parents and my family to the Rose Garden for the award ceremony".<ref name=cfa>Template:Cite web</ref>

Namesakes

Further reading

References

Template:Reflist

Template:Commonscat

Template:Authority control

Retrieved from "https://wiki.sarg.dev/index.php?title=Fred_Lawrence_Whipple&oldid=354133"