Radio telescope inventor Grote Reber Gone

[Moon Traveller - December 28, 2002] - Pioneering radio astronomer Grote Reber died Dec 20, 2002 in his adopted Tasmanian home, where the atmosphere could be clear to electromagnetic radiation of wide wavelength and he could make his marvelous radio maps of the sky.

Wheaton, Ill.-born Reber was of the school of pick up the sticks – and run with them. He wasn’t first to discover radio waves streaking in from the outer cosmos, but he took this small notion and worked to create and integrate the first dish antennas and recorders to begin the cataloging of the radio universe, with -- as the Associated Press points out in its obituary -- its quasars, pulsars and Big Bang afterglows.

Radio astronomy began not with Reber but with Karl Jansky at Bell Labs in he late ‘20s and early ‘30s, as an outgrowth of some telephone lineman support efforts. He was studying thunderstorms, not the stellar sea, trying to identify forms of interference that effected telephone networks.

After eliminating other possible sources, Jansky discovered that the interference emanated from the stars, most directly from the center of the Milky Way. He did so with a constantly circling merry-go-round-like antenna apparatus. But Jansky, whose name became a unit for radio wave emission strength, left matters there. After some fitful starts, Reber came up with the basic radio telescope design. In 1942, Reber completed his first preliminary radio sky maps.

Related
Grote Reber, Who Built First Radio Telescope for Astronomy, Dies at 90 -Dec. 25, 2002, NYT [reg req]
JPL Basics of Radio Astronomy

Last update: 4/12/2003; 11:47:30 AM.