Riccardo Giacconi Biography

Riccardo was born in Genoa, Italy, on October 6, 1931.  He spent most of his life in Milano until 1956, then sailed for the U.S., where he has lived for the rest of his life (save a seven year period he spent in Munich, Germany from 1992-1999).  He was the only child to Elsa Canni Giacconi, a high school teacher of math and physics, and Antonio Giacconi, a small business owner.  His parents were legally separated when he was eight years old.  He later married his high school sweetheart Mirella and fathered three children with her, his two daughters Guia and Anna, and his only son Marc.

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.

Riccardo Giacconi Biography Bibliography

Giacconi, Riccardo. "Riccardo Giacconi - Autobiography." Nobelprize.org. The Nobel Foundation, 2002. Web. 13 May 2011. <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2002/giacconi-autobio.html>.

"Riccardo Giacconi." NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Soylent Communications. Web. 13 May 2011. <http://www.nndb.com/people/031/000027947/>.

"Riccardo Giacconi, Noble Laureate - Biography & Achievements." Italy Travel Guide, About Italy Tourism & Tourist Information. Ultimate Italy. Web. 13 May 2011. <http://www.ultimateitaly.com/peoples/noble-laureate-riccardo-giacconi.html>.

APOD 4.7 (A Beautiful Trifid)

Since we are getting to the end of this year's APODs (not going to miss dealing with this interface), I thought we could wrap it all up by talking about one of the first constellations we learned in the newest APOD.  M20, or the Trifid Nebula, is a celestial object inside the constellation Sagitarius.  It actually consists of three different types of nebulae: red emission nebulae dominated by light emitted by hydrogen atoms, blue reflection nebulae produced by dust reflecting starlight, and dark dust nebulae where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette.  The Trifid has a central red emission nebulae divided into three parts by a few dark dust nebulae, and surrounded by the blue haze of a blue reflection nebulae.

Astrocast #220 (Mass Extinction Events)

Worth two observation hours, per Mr. Percival

In this podcast, Fraser and Pamela talk about the different times in the past where the majority of the life on Earth died, how they died, and how we finally found out about it.  The most recent one, the asteroid that hit the Yucan peninsula, killed most of its victims either from the initial impact, the shock wave directly resulting from the initial impact, or the years of skies darkened by dust thrown up into low Earth orbit (where anything that had been living after the impact and shock wave that had been carried up there died) by the shock wave from the initial impact.  This caused many plants to die, causing many herbivores to starve, resulting in first-level carnivores to slowly die off.  This wave of one trophic level mostly dying off causing another to die off quickly found its way to the highest levels, where it had the most impact because the animals on top have the biggest appetites, and the fewest resources.

In the KT event, the most famous one, where over 70% of the land population and over 95% of the aquatic population died, it is believed that it was the result of a meteor that hit the Earth so hard at just the right angle that the shock wave built up on the opposite side of the world and either created a volcano of its own or pushed the volcanoes already there into overdrive, effectively kicking the populations back down as soon as they tried to rise up out of the rubble.

For the prior events, it gets exponentially harder to research the events because the Earth recycles its crust, so the older impact craters or volcanic debris either has already been recycled or is on the verge of being recycled.  This means that we mostly have to rely on how many died following each event (because it is more likely for fossils to be available from that time period somewhere in the world than it is for one specific point to still be analyzable).

APOD 4.6 (Farther Along)

I chose this image because it literally shows how far we have come in our space age technology.  It shows that some of our oldest probes (Voyager 1, Pioneer 10, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11) are far out there, Voyager 1 farthest out at a distance of 17.5 billion kilometers, or 16 light-hours from the Sun (by comparison, the Earth is 8 light minutes away from the sun), Pioneer 10 close behind at 15.4 billion kilometers, although it is on the opposite side of the solar system from the four other satellites highlighted.  The New Horizons probe, launched a few years ago, should reach Pluto in 2015, which should give us much more data on the dwarf planet when it arrives.

APOD 4.5 (Scintillating)

I picked this one because it shows how little difference there is between a planet and a star.  The planet Mars and the star Regulus both make the same apparent "path" through the sky when their photo is taken by a swinging camera, but since Mars' light scatters less before it arrives here and Regulus' light is less consistent, it makes Mars' path have a constant red color while Regulus' path appears to be rainbow-colored.

Astrocast #212 (GPS navigation)

Worth two observation hours per Mr. Percival

On this episode of astrocast, we learn about GPS satellites, ranging from their invention to the way they function.

As people might expect, GPS was originally a secret military technology (like many great household inventions before it).  The government needed its soldiers to be able to complete missions without having to consult maps (which might ruin a mission due to a lack of landmarks, a false sense of direction, an old map, the soldiers being spotted by the light they are using to see the map, or a host of other possibilities).  So, they used the accuracy of the newly-invented atomic clock to make satellites that, when at least three were in range of you, could tell you your exact position at any given time.  However, when the GPS finally became public, the military was apparently afraid that terrorists could use GPS to guide bombs to a specific location from a long distance, so they programmed in random timing errors, decreasing accuracy significantly.

The errors are gone now, and with many modern devices using GPS along with other technologies (cell phone towers, wireless networks, etc.), GPS is accurate to within the possible timing errors, at the best of times resulting in a possible area less than the size of a Starbucks!