Alan Hale
Alan Hale (* 1958 in Tachikawa , Japan ) is a US -American astronomer .
Alan Hale was born in Japan, but his family moved to Alamogordo , New Mexico , when he was just one year old . After high school, he studied at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis from 1976 to 1980 . He left the Navy in 1983 and went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena . He was busy there with the Deep Space Network . After the Uranus passage from Voyager 2 , he left JPL and studied astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces . After receiving his doctorate in 1992 on Orbital Coplanarity in Solar-Type Binary Systems: Implications for Planetary System Formation and Detection , he first worked for The Space Center in Alamogordo (now the New Mexico Museum of Space History ), and in 1993 he founded the Southwest Institute for Space Research of which he is still director.
The main focus of Hales is the search for exoplanets and small bodies in the solar system , especially comets and near-Earth asteroids . He was best known for the discovery of the comet Hale-Bopp (independent of Thomas Bopp ) and his participation in the International HalleyWatch 1986.
In 1991 the asteroid (4151) Alanhale was named after him.
Hale lives with his wife Eva and sons Zachary and Tyler in the Sacramento Mountains near Cloudcroft , New Mexico .
Web links
- Autobiography ( Memento of January 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- biography
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hale, Alan |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1958 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tachikawa , Japan |