jesse greenstein; r h tucker; minoru oda
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Jesse Leonard Greenstein, Dubridge
Professor Emeritus at the California
Institute of Technology and Associate and
Gold Medallist (1975) of the RAS, died at
the age of 92 in October 2002. Greenstein will
be remembered for his pioneering work in
astronomical spectroscopy, for his statesman-
ship in US astronomy and for his creation of the
great astronomy department at Caltech.
In his autobiographical article “An
Astronomical Life” (1984 Annual Reviews ofAstronomy and Astrophysics 22 1) Jesse wrote
with characteristic irony: “I lack the often-
quoted advantages of an impoverished and
embittered childhood.” He grew up in a pros-
perous Jewish family in Manhattan NY and
early on showed indications of scientific talent.
While still at school he was a radio ham and he
did experiments with a spectroscope, fore-
shadowing his later work as an astronomer.
Jesse went to Harvard at the age of 16 and grad-
uated with a BS in astronomy in 1929. He had
planned to spend a year in Oxford (where he
might have become a theorist) but instead
decided to join the family real-estate business to
ride out the depression. In 1934 Jesse returned
to Harvard to study for a PhD. His thesis was
on observations and theory of interstellar red-
dening. After graduating in 1937 he went on an
NRC Fellowship to the Yerkes Observatory and
then went on to join the University of Chicago
astrophysics faculty.
After wartime work designing optics for the
military, Jesse joined the Caltech faculty in
1947. He was in a unique situation, hired to
build up a graduate department of astronomy
for a relatively new institution with the Palomar
200-inch telescope coming on line and no
astronomy graduate students and only one fac-
ulty member – Fritz Zwicky, a great and extra-
ordinarily creative astronomer who could on
occasions be difficult. Jesse quickly built up a
staff that by 1960 included Zwicky, Guido
Munch, John Bolton, Bev Oke and Maarten
Schmidt. The Caltech astronomy department
was quickly recognized as being one of the out-
standing centres of research and graduate edu-
cation in the USA and was rated by the
National Research Council as the top ranked
department as early as 1964. Jesse remained
executive officer (the Caltech expression for
chairman) for astronomy until 1972 and retired
as Dubridge Professor Emeritus in 1979. He
stopped observing in 1983 but continued to be
active in research until his late 80s.
Most of Jesse’s research was on the physics of
stars, the interstellar medium and, as he
described, “briefly and uncomfortably” on
quasars. He made an early attempt to explain
Grote Reber’s discovery of radio emission from
the Milky Way and later he helped to devise the
Davis and Greenstein mechanism for aligning
elongated interstellar grains in a magnetic field.
However, most of Jesse’s work was in stellar
spectroscopy using the coude spectrographs on
the 100- and 200-inch telescopes. In the 1950s
his work on stellar abundances was done in
concert with the experimental and theoretical
work on nucleosynthesis carried out at the
Caltech Kellogg Laboratory under W A Fowler.
Many important discoveries were made by Jesse
and his students and postdocs during this
period, including the identification of metal-
poor (Population II) stars among the “sub-
dwarfs” and the discovery of helium 3 in stars.
Later he concentrated on the spectra of
M-dwarfs and white dwarfs, including UV data
obtained with IUE. Jesse was particularly fasci-
nated by the extraordinary spectra produced by
very strong magnetic fields in white dwarfs; it
is remarkable that he was a pioneer in this field
in his late 70s and 80s. More details of his sci-
entific work can be found in “The Scientific
Career of Jesse L Greenstein” (A M Boesgaard
1988 IAU Symposium 132 xvii–xxiii).
Photographic plates were used through most of
Jesse’s career. Spectra were widened by setting
the drive in right ascension to be slightly faster
or slower than the sidereal rate so that the star
image moved slowly along the slit. When the
image reached the end of the slit the astronomer
would press the E or W button to return the
image to its starting point. Jesse loved to smoke
small, evil-smelling cigars. Knowledgeable stu-
dents and postdocs could identify a Greenstein
2.38 April 2004 Vol 45
OBITUARIES
Jesse Greenstein
Jesse Leonard Greenstein, 1909–2002Gold Medallist of the RAS, pioneer spectroscopist, lively and influential
US astronomy policy-maker and organizer.
2.39April 2004 Vol 45
OBITUARIES
plate by the uneven exposure along the slit –
caused by flecks of cigar ash settling during the
exposure.
Jesse had a profound influence on US science
policy. He was active in the founding of NRAO
and chaired the second decadal review of
astronomy for the NRC published in 1970
which, among other recommendations, led to
the construction of the VLA. He was active in
founding the National Observatories at Kitt
Peak and later at Cerro Tololo, although he
thought initially that NRAO should be oper-
ated by one of the large private observatories.
Later, Jesse served a term as chairman of the
AURA board.
Jesse won many honours. He was a member
of the US National Academy and was awarded
the Bruce Gold Medal. He was California
Scientist of the Year in 1964. Jesse was partic-
ularly proud of the RAS Gold Medal. I recall an
occasion at our house in Pasadena in the early
70s when Jesse and Fred Hoyle awed the
younger people by comparing the quality of the
gold in their various medals.
Jesse was quite short in stature; he had a deep,
resonant voice and radiated energy. He had a
mercurial temperament, showed his emotions
easily and could be difficult in the short term.
However, in the long term he was wise, toler-
ant, magnanimous and farsighted. Jesse loved
fast cars and for a time held the record for the
trip from Caltech to Palomar (later claimed by
Olin Eggen). Jesse welcomed students, postdocs
and faculty members to Caltech from all over
the world; in fact when I joined the faculty in
1966 he was the only optical astronomer who
had been born in the States. It was a happy and
collegial department in which everyone
accepted Jesse’s leadership. Almost every day he
would lead a group over from the Robinson
Laboratory of Astrophysics at Caltech to the
Athenaeum faculty club for lunch. Postdocs
were welcome at these lunches and several of us
took the opportunity to learn more about the
technicalities of astronomy as well as the wider
world of our subject. The Athenaeum provided,
as it still does, paper place-mats and Jesse could
seldom resist turning his over to draw an equa-
tion or a Grotrian diagram in his characteristic
spiky handwriting. Jesse was a man of broad
culture. He remembered the Latin learned in
high school and was well versed in literature.
Like many astronomers of the older generation,
he loved to guide the telescope to the sound of
classical music. He was particularly fond of
Beethoven’s late string quartets; the cavatina
from Opus 130 was played at his Caltech
memorial.
In 1959 I went to Caltech as a postdoc to
work in Jesse’s “Abundance Project” financed
by the US Air Force and then served with him
as a colleague on the Caltech faculty from 1966.
Jesse was an inspiration to everyone who had
the privilege of working with him. He was not
only an astronomer of remarkable breadth,
energy and resourcefulness and a scientific
statesman, he was also a natural leader and, by
any standards, a great man.
Wallace L W Sargent.
Roy Henry “Tommy” Tucker, who died
suddenly on 4 May 2003, was born in
Southsea on 25 September 1922. His
father was a post-office telegraphist in the
Royal Navy. He spent his early childhood in
Malta and Gibraltar, where he went to school
at the Christian Brothers’ College until he was
12. On returning to England he attended
Portsmouth Grammar School. A few weeks
before the outbreak of war in 1939, while still
only 16, he obtained a post at the Royal
Observatory, Greenwich, through the Civil
Service Clerical Examination. He was one of the
first to be recruited through open competition;
hitherto, junior staff had been recruited directly
from local Greenwich schools. Tommy joined
the Time Department, under Humphrey Smith,
which was evacuated from Greenwich to
Abinger in October 1940. He joined the RAF in
1942 and served in Iceland, with a radio com-
munications unit under Coastal Command.
He returned to Abinger in 1947, at a time
when the Greenwich Time Service was under-
going rapid evolution. The first quartz clock
had been installed at Greenwich in 1939 and
during the next few years the high long-term
stability of quartz clocks rendered the pendu-
lum clocks obsolete for maintaining the Time
Service. But the high performance of the quartz
clocks revealed irregularities in the determina-
tion of GMT from astronomical observations,
due to the movement of the pole, seasonal fluc-
tuations in the length of the day and serious sys-
tematic errors in the catalogue co-ordinates of
stars used in meridian transit observations.
Extensive studies of all these effects were car-
ried out in the computing section of the Time
Department, under Tucker; he was co-author,
with Humphrey Smith, of a definitive analysis
of the annual fluctuation in the Earth’s rotation,
which was published in Monthly Notices in
1953. While at Abinger, Tucker studied for a
BSc at evening classes in Guildford.
In 1956 Tucker was transferred to the Meridian
Department at Herstmonceux, where he
remained for the rest of his career. He succeeded
P A Wayman as head of the department in 1964.
During the 1960s the RGO was heavily engaged
in an international collaboration of meridian
observations of faint stars, to be used as a frame
of reference for a new photographic coverage
(AGK3) of the northern hemisphere by the
Hamburg observatory. This was the last major
programme undertaken on the Cooke Transit
Circle which had been first installed at Greenwich
in 1933. Observations with the Cooke instru-
ment, on the Herstmonceux site, were limited to
approximately visual magnitude 9. It was becom-
ing clear that there was a need for extending this
limit, which would require major instrumental
development and a move to a better site.
A collaboration was set up between RGO, the
University of Copenhagen, Brorfelde, and the
Spanish Naval Observatory, San Fernando, to
move the Danish instrument, which was under-
going a major development for completely auto-
matic operation, to La Palma; the removal was
financed by a grant from the Carlsberg
Foundation. This project represented a major
advance in positional astronomy, which had
been traditionally very labour-intensive. As
leader of the RGO team in this collaboration,
Tucker contributed to the detailed planning of
the complete operating system including the
observational routine and data reduction, until
his retirement in 1982. The Carlsberg
Automatic Meridian Circle came into regular
use in 1984, and since then has been a world
leader in productivity in meridian astronomy.
Tucker was elected a Fellow of the Society in
1949, and President of IAU Commission 8
(Positional Astronomy) from 1976 to 1979.
A talented pianist, Tucker took a leading part
in organizing and performing in staff enter-
tainments. He was active in his local parish
church, as a lay preacher and in playing the
organ. For several years up to the time of his
death he was treasurer of the charity Caring and
Sharing, in the Chichester Diocese. His first
wife, whom he married in 1950, died in 1994.
He re-married in 1998 and is survived by his
second wife, and two sons and a daughter from
his first marriage.
C Andrew Murray. I am grateful to formercolleagues N J P O’Hora and L V Morrison, andthe RGO Archivist A J Perkins, for their assistancein compiling this obituary.
R H Tucker, 1922–2003Fellow of the RAS, distinguished positional astronomer and Herstmonceux stalwart.
2.40 April 2004 Vol 45
OBITUARIES
Minoru Oda was the first person from
Japan that I knew. Our long, warm
and productive relationship began in
1967, when I spent the summer working with
Riccardo Giacconi’s group at American Science
and Engineering and Dr Oda was with George
Clark at MIT. Space science was still a very
young subject, of course, and many scientific
collaborations were just beginning. However, I
believe I was Minoru’s first link with the UK
space community, a connection that was later
to lead to a major collaboration between our
two island nations.
The 1960s was a time of great excitement in
X-ray astronomy, with research groups from the
USA, Japan, Europe (and Australia) using the
new sub-orbital research rockets to search the
sky for additions to the handful of unexpectedly
powerful cosmic X-ray sources still carrying the
names of the host constellation. A major issue
at the time, as subsequently with gamma-ray
bursters, was identification. There, Minoru
made an early and crucial contribution with the
development of the modulation collimator, a
technique yielding X-ray source positions of
much improved precision. The resulting success
in identifying Cygnus X-1 with a blue supergiant
star led naturally to Oda’s extended interest in
that unique object. I suspect the early achieve-
ment of Japan’s first space science satellite,
Hakucho, launched in 1979 and led by Prof.
Oda, was driven by his determination to further
explore such remarkable cosmic phenomena.
Viewed from the UK, the Japanese space sci-
ence programme that rapidly developed under
Minoru’s leadership, based first at Tokyo
University and later at the Institute for Space
and Astronautical Science (ISAS), was both
familiar and enviable. The familiarity was in the
approach, in which space experiments were
designed and built by university researchers in
their own laboratories. That approach con-
trasted with the much larger programmes in the
USA and the Soviet Union. What increasingly
we envied was the growth in funding in Japan,
and particularly the independent launcher capa-
bility available to Japanese researchers. With
hindsight the stage was well set, following our
separate successes with Ariel 5 and 6, and with
Hakucho and Tenma, for the first Japan–UK
collaboration in X-ray astronomy, GINGA.
ASTRO-C was an ambitious project, aiming to
orbit an X-ray detector array an order of mag-
nitude larger than anything previously
attempted in Japan or Europe, and comparable
to the large NASA HEAO-1 mission. With the
substantial, but much smaller resources at ISAS,
Minoru made the case to explore assistance from
outside Japan. Happily for us in the UK, he
decided our experience in building X-ray detec-
tors for the Ariel satellites and EXOSAT was rel-
evant and I was invited to visit Tokyo with
senior officials from the UK Science Research
Council in 1979. From the start, the relationship
was a happy one, the collaboration building
readily on the mutual trust and regard from both
sides. The outcome – as they say – is history,
with ASTRO-C being re-named as GINGA fol-
lowing a successful launch in February 1987 and
going on to enjoy four near-flawless years as the
major source of X-ray data for astronomers
worldwide until re-entry in 1991.
In addition to the scientific impact of GINGA,
the collaboration was widely referenced in the
UK and Japan as a model of international co-
operation. A longer-lasting benefit resulted
from the exchange of scientists, particularly stu-
dents, between our two countries, forming links
that continue to underpin new joint endeavours
today. Recalling the importance Minoru placed
on encouraging an outward-looking approach
in Japanese science, I know he will have judged
the latter benefit to be as important as the direct
scientific returns from GINGA.
Humility is a measure of true greatness and
Minoru had this gift in full. During the early
studies of Cygnus X-1, when a key target was
to find a characteristic period in the X-ray emis-
sion, one of Minoru’s students – who shall be
nameless – produced a light curve from random
data. As the supervisor examined the data, sug-
gesting a period was indeed apparent, the truth
was revealed. Minoru stood back, smiled and
said that his student had taught him a lesson he
would not forget. Those of us fortunate enough
to have really known Minoru will recall many
happy memories, and our own valuable lessons,
from that association.
He is greatly missed.
Ken Pounds.
Deaths of FellowsProf. Sir Robert BoydBorn 19 October 1922Elected 12 February 1960Died 5 February 2004
Mr G W CreightonBorn 15 December 1907Elected 14 February 1969
Prof. J A Jacobs (Associate)Born 13 April 1916Elected 12 January 1951Died 13 December 2003
Dr E M PuchnarewiczBorn 8 August 1964Elected 11 January 1991Died December 2003
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Minoru Oda
Minoru OdaAssociate of the RAS, leader of Japanese space science, advocate and exemplar
of UK–Japan collaboration.
Notes for authors submitting to A&G
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