Jerry Nelson (astronomer)
Jerry Earl Nelson (born January 15, 1944 in Los Angeles County , California - † June 10, 2017 in Santa Cruz , California) was an American astronomer . He was a pioneer in the technique of building large telescope mirrors from individual segments, and was instrumental in the design and construction of the Keck telescopes .
Life
Jerry Nelson received a BS in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1965 and a Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971 and worked for a long time at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . Since 1994 he has been a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz . From 1999 to 2004 he was founding director of the center for adaptive optics there . He was the lead scientist on the Thirty Meter Telescope project.
Since 1977 he has been involved in the design of a telescope with a 10 m primary mirror diameter, twice as much as the Hale telescope and BTA, the largest telescopes at the time . The earlier concept of designing primary mirrors that were inherently stable in shape as each telescope position had reached its limit and would have led to an unrealistically heavy and expensive telescope with much larger mirrors. Nelson's radical suggestion was to divide the mirror into light hexagonal segments. As a result, Nelson and coworkers solved the difficulties in producing the segments in the correct shape and in the highly precise control of the alignment of the segments during telescope operation. In 1993 the first of the Keck telescopes went into operation and demonstrated the practical success of this new concept. Today it is the basis for planning even larger telescopes such as the European Extremely Large Telescope or the Thirty Meter Telescope .
Awards
- 1995 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics
- 1996 Joseph Fraunhofer Award and Robert M. Burley Prize from the Optical Society of America
- 1996 member of the National Academy of Sciences
- 1998 Prix Andre Lallemand of the French Academy of Sciences
- 2010 Kavli Prize
- 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute)
- Foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences
Web links
- Jerry E. Nelson on the website of the University of California, Santa Cruz (English)
- Report on the development of the Keck telescope, based on an interview by Linda Copman with Jerry Nelson (English)
- Lecture of Nelson to the emergence of the Keck telescopes (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tim Stephens: Astronomer Jerry Nelson, pioneering designer of large telescopes, dies at age 73. In: ucsc.edu. University of California, Santa Cruz , June 13, 2017, accessed June 13, 2017 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Nelson, Jerry |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Nelson, Jerry Earl (full name); Nelson, Jerry E. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 15, 1944 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Los Angeles County , California , United States |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 10, 2017 |
| Place of death | Santa Cruz , California , United States |