Gordon Pettengill
| Gordon Pettengill | |
|---|---|
| Born | Gordon H. Pettengill February 10, 1926 Providence, Rhode Island, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of California, Berkeley |
| Thesis | Measurements on Proton-Proton Scattering in the Energy Region 150 to 340 MEV (1954) |
| Doctoral students |
Steven J. Ostro Stewart Nozette |
| Notable awards |
Guggenheim Fellowship (1980) Magellanic Premium (1994) Charles A. Whitten Medal (1997) |
Gordon H. Pettengill (born February 10, 1926) is an American radio astronomer and planetary physicist.
A native of Providence, Rhode Island, as a young man, Pettengill was enthralled with radio and electronics, taking apart and building old radios. This was to serve as a beginning to a career using radio and its alter-ego, radar, in many of its most practical and esoteric aspects. Most importantly he had a strong curiosity about the laws governing what he experienced as well as a keenly precise reasoning to answer it.
Pettingill's amateur radio callsign is W1OUN.
His undergraduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was briefly interrupted by service in Europe at the end of World War II. This was followed by work at Los Alamos and a doctorate from University of California, Berkeley.
Pettengill was one of the first pioneers to take radar from its original military application to its use as a grand tool for astronomy.
He was the driving force behind using the then-new Millstone radar at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for the earliest work in radar astronomy. When it became operational in late 1957, Pettengill used this radar to "skin track" Sputnik I, the first such observation of a satellite. His earliest research, extending well beyond the Earth's orbit was with this same radar in 1961; he used it to make the first ranging measurements to another planet, Venus, to which he would return with more distinction later in his career. These first observations yielded a value for the astronomical unit in terrestrial units which has stood the test of time and has an accuracy some 3 orders of magnitude greater than had been possible with the armamentarium of classical positional astronomy. Such knowledge was critical for the successful navigation of Mariner 2 to Venus.
...
Wikipedia