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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ContactAll contributions should be sent toDr Sue Bowler, Editor, Astronomy &Geophysics, Dept of Physics andAstronomy, The University of Leeds,Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.s.bowler@leeds.ac.uk.

Minoru Oda

Minoru OdaAssociate of the RAS, leader of Japanese space science, advocate and exemplar

of UK–Japan collaboration.

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