Deceased--Bill Gordon

Bill Gordon
January 8th, 1918 to February 16th, 2010

"Former Cornell prof, father of the Arecibo telescope, dies"

Februrary 18th, 2010

The Ithaca Journal.com

A former Cornell University professor best known for his contribution to the creation of the Arecibo Observatory died Tuesday.

Bill Gordon, the engineer who conceived, built and managed the Arecibo Observatory -- arguably the world's largest ear aimed toward the universe -- located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was 92 and died of natural causes.

In the late 1950s, Gordon began designing the radar system for the purpose of investigating Earth's ionosphere, out to distances of several thousand miles.

At Arecibo's 40th anniversary in 2003, Gordon said, "When we were talking about building (the telescope) back in the late '50s, we were told by eminent authorities it couldn't be done. We were in the position of trying to do something that was impossible, and it took a lot of guts and we were young enough that we didn't know we couldn't do it. It took five years from idea to dedication, and that is short. But we were in the right place at the right time and had the right idea and the right preparation. We had no rules or precedents."

Gordon realized that the telescope could also contribute to the study of the solar system and to the then relatively new field of radio astronomy, according to an obituary released by Cornell University. Taking a technical gamble, he and his Advanced Research Project Agency sponsors designed a telescope with a 1,000-foot fixed spherical reflector and a movable focusing system that is suspended above the reflector.

The resulting structure was a marvel of civil engineering. It's so large that the Empire State Building could fit sideways in the dish's rim and the Washington Monument could fit standing from the dish bottom to its focal point. The observatory was inaugurated in 1963, when the first measurements of the properties of the ionosphere were made.

Over the past half-century, the telescope has been used to determine the planet Mercury's rotation period, pinpoint the source of radio pulses coming from the direction of a supernova called the Crab Nebula, produce the first radar maps of the surface of Venus, create the first 3-D images of the universe, and most recently, as noted on the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center's Web site, to document the discovery of the first triple asteroid system among near-Earth asteroids -- an asteroid 1.5 miles in diameter with two moons orbiting it.

Today, the observatory is primarily used to search for asteroids and comets on a track toward Earth.

William E. Gordon was born Jan. 8, 1918, in Paterson, N.J. He earned a bachelor's degree from Montclair State Teacher's College, a master's degree from New York University and his doctorate at Cornell.

During World War II, Gordon served in the Air Force as captain and electronics engineer, and worked with the National Defense Research Committee on the effects of weather on radar range. He came to Cornell in 1948. In 1950, Gordon published, with Henry G. Booker, the theory of radio wave scattering in the troposphere. He left Cornell in 1966 for Rice University in Houston, retiring in 1985.

Gordon served as the observatory's director from 1960 to 1965. Using the radar signals returned by charged particles, he studied the temperature, density, chemical composition and other properties of the ionosphere, which he called "both the gateway to space and our first line of defense against the deadly radiation streaming toward us from the sun and other stars."

"Designer of famous Arecibo telescope dies at 92 "

by

Mary Esch

February 18th, 2010

Associated Press

Astronomer and engineer Bill Gordon, who designed the photogenic radio telescope in Puerto Rico that spotted the first planets beyond our solar system and lakes on one of Saturn's moons, has died in New York state. He was 92.

Gordon died Tuesday of natural causes, according to officials at Cornell University in Ithaca, the Ivy League college where he served on the engineering faculty from 1953-66.

He designed the Arecibo Observatory's radio telescope in the 1950s; it's a 1,000-foot-wide dish set in a sinkhole surrounded by forested hills.

Within a year of opening, it was used to determine the planet Mercury's period of rotation. After radio pulsars — rotating neutron stars — were discovered in 1967, the observatory played a prominent role in studying their properties.

The astronomers Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse discovered the first binary pulsar at Arecibo in 1974, leading to a 1993 Nobel Prize in physics.

In 1990, Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan used the telescope in the discovery of a pulsar in the constellation Virgo that was shown to be orbited by the first known planets beyond Earth's solar system.

The telescope, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by Cornell, had a prominent role in the 1997 Jodie Foster film "Contact," based on a Carl Sagan book about the search for extraterrestrial life — a hunt that still continues at the observatory. In the 1995 James Bond movie "GoldenEye," the telescope's platform figured in the climactic fight scene.

"When we were talking about building (the telescope) back in the late '50s, we were told by eminent authorities it couldn't be done," Gordon said at Arecibo's 40th Anniversary in 2003. "We were in the position of trying to do something that was impossible, and it took a lot of guts and we were young enough that we didn't know we couldn't do it."

These days, the telescope's work includes searching for asteroids and comets headed for Earth. It also discovered lakes of hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon Titan.

Gordon was born in Paterson, N.J., and earned a bachelor's degree from Montclair State Teacher's College, a master's degree from New York University and his doctorate at Cornell. He was a professor and administrator at Rice University in Texas from 1966 until his retirement in 1985.

Arecibo Observatory

Arecibo Observatory [Wikipedia]