| Tom Gehrels |
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Information AboutTom Gehrels |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT TOM GEHRELS | |
| 1925 births | |
| gehrels, tom | |
| living people | |
| dutch astronomers | |
| american astronomers | |
| asteroid discoverers | |
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He helped to set up the Spacewatch program for finding Near-Earth Asteroid s. He has discovered a number of Comet s, including periodic comets 64P/Swift-Gehrels , 78P/Gehrels , 82P/Gehrels , and 90P/Gehrels . He has also discovered over 3000 Asteroid s, including the Apollo Asteroid s 1864 Daedalus and 5011 Ptah , and the Amor Asteroid 4587 Rees , as well as dozens of Trojan Asteroid s. He was principal investigator for the Imaging Photopolarimeter experiment on the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 probes to Jupiter and Saturn. Most of his later asteroid discoveries were made jointly with the husband and wife team of Cornelis Johannes Van Houten and Ingrid Van Houten-Groeneveld . He did a sky survey using the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory and shipped the plates to the two Dutch astronomers at Leiden Observatory , who analyzed them for new asteroids. The trio are jointly credited with several thousand discoveries. During World War II Gehrels was a member of the Dutch resistance, and he has interviewed surviving political prisoners who were forced to build V-1 and V-2 rockets under the supervision of Wernher Von Braun . He has charged that von Braun bears greater responsibility and guilt for harsh treatment of prisoners than his official "sanitized" biography would imply. {Link without Title} BOOKS ''On the Glassy Sea: An Astronomer's Journey'', Tom Gehrels, ISBN 0-88318-598-9 |
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