John A. O'Keefe (astronomer)

John Aloysius O'Keefe III (1916–2000) was an expert in planetary science and astrogeology with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from 1958 to 1995. He and his co-authors, Ann Eckels and Ken Squires, are credited with the discovery that the Earth had a significant third degree spherical harmonic in its gravitational field using U.S. Vanguard satellite data collected in the late 1950s.. The "pear shaped" Earth as it was known became front-page news and was even the subject of a "Peanuts" cartoon. He was the first to propose the idea of a scanning microscope in 1956 and he is the co-discoverer of the YORP effect (short for Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddock effect), an effect resulting from sunlight which causes a small celestial body such as an asteroid or meteor to spin up or down.

O'Keefe was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on October 13, 1916. He was the oldest of four children of Edward Scott O'Keefe and Ruth Evans. O'Keefe spent his last two years of high school at Exeter Academy. He then went to Harvard, following in the footsteps of his fathers and grandfathers on both sides as well as all four of his uncles. He graduated in 1937 with an A.B. degree in astronomy. He spent another year at the Harvard College Observatory doing graduate study under Harlow Shapley. At Shapley's urging he went on to graduate studies at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago where he earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1941. His first major discovery, while in graduate school (1938}, was that clouds of solid carbon cause the peculiar dips in the light curve of R Coronae Borealis, the archetype of a class of carbon-rich stars. After earning his doctorate he spent a year at Brenau University teaching Mathematics and Physics.

When World War II broke out, O'Keefe was rejected by the draft so he instead joined the Army Map Service Corps of Engineers as a civilian producing improved maps for the war effort. He continued this work during the cold war. His best-know protégé at Army Map Service was William M. Kaula who went on to become an authority on satellite geodesy.

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