Leon Van Speybroeck

Leon Van Speybroeck (born August 27, 1935 in Wichita (Kansas) , † December 25, 2002 in Newton (Massachusetts) ) was an American physicist, astrophysicist and engineer. He was considered a leading designer of mirrors for X-ray telescopes and was a telescope scientist at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory .

Van Speybroeck studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in 1957 and a doctorate in 1965 with Henry Kendall and Jerome Friedman . The dissertation was on elastic electron-deuteron scattering with high momentum transfer. He then did research for two years at MIT before moving to American Science and Engineering (AS&E) in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1967 , where he was in the X-ray astronomy group of Riccardo Giacconi , where he developed mirrors for X-ray telescopes, starting with the telescope in the Skylab , which was active there in 1973/74 and provided significant new knowledge about the solar corona and magnetic dynamo processes in it. In 1973 he went with Giacconi to the newly founded Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in the high-energy astrophysics group. Van Speybroeck developed the mirrors for the Einstein Observatory (active 1978 to 1981), which had a pioneering role in X-ray astronomy. For this he received the George W. Goddard Award from SPIE in 1985 . He then led the development of an X-ray telescope mirror of even greater precision, the Advancedx-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), later the Chandra Telescope (active from 1999). For this, many new technologies, including in metrology, have been developed and a resolution of up to half an arc second has been achieved (ten times better than before). He worked with Optical Coating Laboratory Inc. in Santa Rosa, Hughes Danbury Optical Systems Inc. in Danbury, Connecticut, and Eastman Kodak Co. in Rochester.

When Van Speybroeck died of metastatic melanoma, he was leading a team at the Chandra Telescope that wanted to check the Hubble constant by observing galaxy clusters. The results of the project they continued were published by his colleagues in August 2006 in the Astrophysical Journal.

As one of the leading telescope specialists, he was also involved in the COSTAR project to correct the Hubble telescope error.

In 2002 he received the Bruno Rossi Prize . He had prepared a speech about X-ray astronomy, which his colleague Harvey Tananbaum then gave.

Web links

• Paul Gorenstein, Harvey Tananbaum, Obituary in Physics Today, Volume 56, 2003, No. 9, p. 78