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* AP – FILE - This May 31, 2007 file photo shows the world's largest
radio telescope -- the Arecibo Observatory …
By MARY ESCH, Associated Press Writer Mary Esch, Associated Press Writer –
Thu Feb 18, 5:53 pm ET
ALBANY, N.Y. – 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
73' Wilfredo "Junior" Aviles / KP4ARN
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