Jerry Nelson (astronomer)
| Jerry Nelson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 15, 1944 Los Angeles County, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | astronomy |
| Institutions | Lick Observatory, University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Alma mater | California Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley |
| Known for | segmented mirror telescopes |
| Notable awards |
Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics (1995) Kavli Prize for Astrophysics (2010) |
Jerry Earl Nelson (born January 15, 1944) is an American astronomer known for his pioneering work designing segmented mirror telescopes, which led to him receiving the 2010 Kavli Prize for Astrophysics.
He is the principal designer and project scientist for the Keck telescopes.
As a high school student in 1960, Nelson got an early start in astronomy when he attended the Summer Science Program where he studied under astronomers Paul Routly and George Abell. Growing up in Kagel Canyon outside of Los Angeles, he was the first child from his town to go to college.
He got his B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1965 and his Ph.D. in elementary particle physics from University of California, Berkeley in 1972. While at Caltech, he helped to design and build a 1.5-meter telescope.
In 1977, when Nelson worked in the Physics Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he was appointed to a five-person committee to design a 10-meter telescope, twice the diameter of the best telescope of the time. He concluded that only a segmented design would be sensible to overcome structural difficulties. His design had 36 hexagonal mirror segments, each six feet in diameter and just three inches thick. This led to the creation of the revolutionary twin 10-meter Keck telescopes.
"The Hale Telescope was very innovative for its day, but in terms of advancing the state of the art--or at least pushing the available technology to its limits--it's been downhill ever since for optical telescopes. It is time for a forward step, not just making improvements in an old design."
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