Brian Geoffrey Marsden [1] was a British astronomer born in Cambridge, England, and educated at The Perse School in Cambridge, New College, Oxford and Yale University died after a long illness he was , 73 . Dr. Marsden was the longtime director of the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (director emeritus from 2006 to 2010).[2]| (5 August 1937 – 18 November 2010) |
Life
Marsden specialized in celestial mechanics and astrometry, collecting data on the positions of asteroids and comets and computing their orbits, often from minimal observational information and providing their future positions on International Astronomical Union (IAU) circulars. In addition to serving as MPC director since 1978, he served as the director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) from 1968 to 1999.[3] He was president of Commission 6, and Commission 20 of the IAU.[4]Marsden helped recover once lost asteroids and lost comets. Some asteroid and comet discoveries of previous decades were "lost" because not enough observational data had been obtained at the time to determine a reliable enough orbit to know where to look for re-observation at future dates. Occasionally, a newly discovered object turns out to be a rediscovery of a previously lost object, which can be determined by calculating its orbit backwards into the past and matching calculated positions with the previously recorded positions of the lost object. In the case of comets this is especially tricky because of nongravitational forces that can affect their orbits (one of which is emission of jets of gas from the comet nucleus), but Marsden has specialized in calculating such nongravitational forces. Notably, he successfully predicted the 1992 return of the once-lost Comet Swift-Tuttle.
In 1998, he calculated that an asteroid, (35396) 1997 XF11 might strike the Earth in 2028. Marsden chose to issue a press release, which Robert Roy Britt called a false alarm.[5]
- "... astronomers created a media storm by announcing that an asteroid could collide with Earth in 2028, only to revise the estimates hours later." --Gretchen Vogel, Science, 20 March 1998
- "Much as the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed a scare like that to bring attention to this problem." (Scientific American magazine, 2003)[7]
He once proposed that Pluto should be cross-listed as both a planet and a minor planet and assigned the asteroid number 10000; however, this proposal was not accepted. A similar proposal was, however, finally accepted in 2006 when Pluto was designated minor planet 134340 and also declared a dwarf planet.
- Marsden won enmity with a segment of the public as a leader of the campaign to downgrade Pluto. Partly at his urging, the International Astronomical Union voted at a meeting in Prague in 2006 to designate Pluto and three asteroids “dwarf planets.”[7]
| 37556 Svyaztie | August 28, 1982 | with N. S. Chernykh |
Family
He married Nancy Lou Zissell; they had a daughter, Cynthia Louise Marsden-Williams, and a son, Jonathan Brian Marsden.[8]Honours
Awards- George Van Biesbroeck Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1989)
- Brouwer Award of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (1995)[9]
- Royal Astronomical Society Award for Service to Astronomy and Geophysics (2006)
- Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[10]
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