William J. Borucki

William J. (Bill) Borucki (born 1939) is a space scientist who worked at the NASA Ames Research Center. Upon joining NASA in 1962, Borucki designed the heat shields for Apollo program spacecraft. He later turned his attention to the optical efficiency of lightning strikes in the atmospheres of planets, investigating the propensity that these lightning strikes could create molecules that would later become the precursors for life. Subsequently, Borucki's attention turned to extrasolar planets and their detection, particularly through the transit method. In light of this work, Borucki was named the principal investigator for NASA's Kepler mission, launched on March 6, 2009 and dedicated to a transit-based search for habitable planets. In 2013, Borucki was awarded the United States National Academy of Sciences's Henry Draper Medal for his work with Kepler. In 2015 he received the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Born in Chicago in 1939, Borucki grew up in Delavan, Wisconsin. He studied physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, earning a master's degree in the subject 1962. Following this, Borucki started work on Apollo program heat shields, which were designed to protect the spacecraft and their occupants from being destroyed by the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere. After his work for Apollo, Borucki studied meteorology at San Jose State University, earning a master's degree in 1982. That year, Borucki began studies at NASA into the nature of lightning, using satellites equipped with instrumentation he helped design in order to discover what fraction of the energy in this lightning went into the production of prebiotic molecules. As a part of this research, Borucki conducted analysis based on observations from space probes in order to find the frequency of lightning on other planets within the Solar System.

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