Frank B. McDonald
| Frank B. McDonald | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | May 28, 1925 Columbus, Georgia |
| Died | August 31, 2012 (aged 87) Ann Arbor, Michigan |
| Citizenship | American |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Physics, Astrophysics |
| Institutions |
University of Iowa Goddard Space Flight Center University of Maryland |
| Alma mater |
Duke University University of Minnesota |
| Doctoral advisor | Edward P. Ney |
| Notable students | Taeil Bai Steven H. Prado Guenter Riegler Peter Serlemitsos Robert F. Silverberg Bonnard J. Teegarden |
Frank Bethune McDonald (May 28, 1925 – August 31, 2012) was an American astrophysicist who helped design scientific instruments for research flights into space. He was a key force behind several initiatives and programs of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for which he served as chief scientist.
During his career, he was project scientist on nine NASA missions and principal investigator on 15 space experiments. He wrote more than 300 scientific publications. In 1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
McDonald was born in Columbus, Georgia to Frank B. McDonald and Lucy Kyle McDonald. After he graduated from Duke University in 1948, he attended the University of Minnesota where he obtained a master's degree in 1951. Here, under the supervision of Edward P. Ney, he completed a doctorate in physics in 1955. For his thesis, he carried out balloon flights to the top of the atmosphere of a cloud chamber triggered by a scintillation counter to study the charge distribution of primary cosmic rays.
In 1956, McDonald began his career at the University of Iowa. In collaboration with James A. Van Allen he worked on “rockoons”, which were small rockets lifted to 70,000 feet by balloons. At this height, the rockets would ignite and shoot up to 350,000 feet, carrying equipment intended to study cosmic rays and particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field. The same year, McDonald combined the scintillation counter of his thesis with a cherenkov detector into a balloon instrument that not only provided a novel measurement of the energy spectrum of primary cosmic ray helium nuclei, but also served as a prototype for devices carried on many spacecraft.
In 1959, McDonald became one of the first scientists to join NASA's new Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. For the next 11 years, he carried out cosmic ray research here as head of the Energetic Particles Branch. During that time, he provided the conceptual framework for a series of small spacecraft known as the international monitoring platforms, or IMP.
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