Gordon Hemenway Pettengill was an American radio astronomer and planetary physicist.
14 Facts About Gordon Pettengill
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Gordon Pettengill was one of the first to take radar from its original military application to its use as a tool for astronomy.
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Gordon Pettengill was professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Gordon Pettengill was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts where he developed a fascination with radio and electronics.
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Gordon Pettengill began studying physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1942 at the age of 16.
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Gordon Pettengill's studies were briefly interrupted by service in Europe at the end of World War II.
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Gordon Pettengill began his career at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1954.
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When it became operational in late 1957, Gordon Pettengill used this radar to "skin track" Sputnik I, the first such observation of a satellite.
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Gordon Pettengill successfully completed a two-dimensional radar mapping of the Moon in 1960, a key step in the US preparations for the Apollo program, ensuring that the Apollo astronauts would not disappear under a meters-thick layer of dust.
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From 1963 to 1965, Gordon Pettengill served as associate director and from 1968 to 1970 as Director of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
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Gordon Pettengill was appointed Professor of Planetary Physics in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT in 1970.
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Gordon Pettengill played a leading role in the first radar studies of an asteroid, a comet, and moons of other planets.
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Gordon Pettengill's observations embraced Mercury, Venus, Mars, several asteroids and comets, the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.
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Gordon Pettengill won the Charles A Whitten Medal from the American Geophysical Union in 1997.