Riccardo was a young teenager when WWII broke out. His parents sent him to live with his aunts, Giulia and Elisa Canni, in Cremona after Milona was bombed in 1942. He thought of his cousin Giovanni Benini, the son of Giulia, as his brother. He was able to return home two years later.
Riccardo did not have a very solid education. He bounced around between schools almost every year, he frequently cut class, and had a discipline problem. He skipped his last year of high school to go straight to the University of Milano. Once there, he stayed long enough to finish his thesis on the development of nuclear interactions by protons in the lead plates of a cloud chamber, then immediately left for a real job in science.
He worked with R.W. Thompson, an expert in cloud chamber research, from 1956-1959. In that time, Riccardo and his colleagues worked hard trying to find new uses for cloud chambers, but ultimately failing: cloud chambers were a dead end. Soon after Riccardo fellowship to Princeton expired, he joined American Science and Engineering (AS&E) to initiate a program of space sciences for the 28-man company.
The three-year period from 1959-1962 were among the most productive years of Riccardo's life, despite it starting off with his department consisting of only him and two technicians. He was heavily involved in classified research: 19 rocket payloads, six satellite payloads, one entire satellite, and an aircraft payload. He also started development on the x-ray telescope and the first few flights of rocket payloads for x-ray astronomy. However, Riccardo was seriously annoyed with the excessive amount of time between x-ray astronomy's conception and its execution, specifically that of the space telescope known at the time as AXAF, but currently known as Chandra.
When Riccardo and eight members of his group were commissioned by NASA to build "Einstein", they wanted to operate "Einstein" as a national observatory open to astronomers of all disciplines, but thought that AS&E was not the place to do it from, so they decided to go to the Center for Astrophysics (CfA). However, once there, they found that they got even less support than at AS&E. It then took an additional 20 years to turn Chandra into a reality.
After Chandra’s completion, Riccardo and a few members of his Chandra team joined the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, which was in serious disarray when they got on the development team. It couldn’t find guide stars as quickly and easily as had been planned, it couldn’t point to planets, and it lacked the tools to schedule its own complex operations, just to name a few of the biggest problems. Despite all this, Riccardo and his team were able to use their problem-solving abilities to save the failing program and make it the famous success we know today. However, his son, Marc, died in an auto accident around this time, so Riccardo and Mirella immediately left in search of other places that didn’t bring up such bad memories.
He eventually joined the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and helped them out with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) program. It was difficult because the project was so large that it cost more than the observatory’s yearly budget, and it was 30 times larger than their previous telescope, the New Technology Telescope. However, this was easily overcome by simply shifting the management style to one suitable for large projects, using a few systems that had been recently proven on Hubble, and getting the astronomers to accept the idea of a single observatory where quality was much more important than quantity.
In 2002, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work inventing the field of x-ray astronomy.
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