Ewen Whitaker

Ewen A. Whitaker is a British-born (22 June 1922) astronomer who has specialized in Lunar studies since 1951. During WW2 he was engaged in quality control—by UV spectrographic analysis—of the lead sheathing of hollow cables strung under the English Channel as part of the secret Project PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) to supply gasoline to Allied military vehicles in France. After the war he obtained a position at the Royal Greenwich Observatory working on the UV spectra of stars, but became interested in lunar studies. As a sideline, Whitaker drew and published in 1954 the first accurate chart of the South Polar area of the Moon and served as director of the Lunar Section of the British Astronomical Association.

After meeting Dr. Gerard P. Kuiper, Director of Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin, USA, at an International Astronomical Union meeting in Dublin in 1955, he was invited to join Kuiper's fledgling Lunar Project at Yerkes to work on producing a high-quality photographic atlas of the moon. The dawn of the Space Age with the launch of the Russian Sputnik 1 soon put the Lunar Project in NASA's limelight.

In 1960 Whitaker followed Kuiper to the University of Arizona where the small Lunar Project evolved into the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) with over 300 scientists, technicians, and supporting staff. The resulting Photographic Lunar Atlas, Orthographic Atlas of the Moon (giving accurate positions on the lunar surface), and the Rectified Lunar Atlas (giving astronaut-eye views of the whole lunar nearside) proved to be invaluable for the planning and operational stages of later spacecraft missions to the moon. Whitaker was involved with several NASA missions, including successfully locating the landing site of the Surveyor 3. This was used to set the landing site for the Apollo 12 mission whose astronauts visited the Surveyor lander.

Whitaker has been considered by some to be the world's leading expert on lunar mapping and nomenclature. He has been active in the IAU's Task Group for Lunar Nomenclature. In 1999 he published a book on the history of lunar mapping and nomenclature, titled "Mapping and Naming the Moon."

Ewen Whitaker retired from the LPL in 1978 becoming research scientist emeritus. He resides in Tucson, Arizona.[1] His wife Beryl died in 2013.

NASA teams

Other achievements

First to apply the Zwicky technique of differential UV/Red photography to the Moon, which maps areas of differing chemical composition of the lunar surface. Results used in Apollo site choices.

Discovery and approximate determination of the orbital eccentricity and inclination of Miranda, Uranus's 5th satellite, made possible by a simple plate-measuring method that he devised and which gave a tenfold increase in precision (from plates taken decades earlier).

With colleague D. W. Arthur added about 60 new names to anonymous craters near the limb of the moon that had been brought into prominence in the Rectified Atlas. The names were adopted internationally. More recently, he chose 14 favorably located farside craters to commemorate the Challenger and Columbia astronauts who lost their lives in the two disasters. These were also adopted internationally over competing suggestions.

Whitaker determined, with considerable confidence, the dates on which Galileo made his drawings of the Moon and composed the various relevant sections of his "Sidereus Nuncius."

He devised a logical lettering system for designating unnamed craters on the Moon's farside. This was adopted unanimously for universal use by the IAU in 2006, as was the corrected list of letters for nearside craters which L. E. Anderson and he compiled in 1982.

Works

Over 130 atlases, reports, papers, articles, reviews, chapters for books, letters, etc. A selection of the more important given below.

Other recognition

Sources of above information:-

  1. Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona (Curriculum Vitae and Publications list for E. A. Whitaker)
  2. Who's Who in America" 2010 Edition
  3. The subject himself. The introductory section was completely re-written by Mister Whitaker, and entered by a friend and temporary house guest of the Whitakers, on 29 May 2010. A few minor updates were added in 2014.

Bibliography

References

  1. IAU on-line member directory, October 2014
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