Jerry Earl Nelson (January 15, 1944 – June 10, 2017) was an American
astronomer known for his pioneering work designing
segmented mirrortelescopes,[1] which led to him sharing the 2010
Kavli Prize for Astrophysics.[2]
He was the principal designer and project scientist for the
Keck telescopes.[3]
Education
Nelson was born in Los Angeles County on January 15, 1944.[4][5] As a high school student in 1960, Nelson got an early start in astronomy when he attended the
Summer Science Program where he studied under astronomers Paul Routly and
George Abell.[6] Growing up in
Kagel Canyon outside of
Los Angeles, he was the first child from his town to go to college.[7]
In 1977, when Nelson worked in the Physics Division of the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he was appointed to a five-person committee to design a 10-meter telescope, twice the diameter of the best telescope of the time. He concluded that only a segmented design would be sensible to overcome structural difficulties. His design had 36 hexagonal mirror segments, each six feet in diameter and just three inches thick. This led to the creation of the revolutionary twin 10-meter
Keck telescopes.[7][9][10][11]
"The
Hale Telescope was very innovative for its day, but in terms of advancing the state of the art--or at least pushing the available technology to its limits--it's been downhill ever since for optical telescopes. It is time for a forward step, not just making improvements in an old design."
Segments solved the structural problem but created a new one involving the alignment of the segments. To deal with this, Nelson contributed to the design of an alignment system that used 168 electronic sensors mounted on the edges of the hexagonal mirror segments and 108 motor-driven adjusting mechanisms to continually keep the mirror system in the correct shape.[10][11]
His proposal was met with skepticism. It was felt that the scheme was too complex to ever work. Eventually, Nelson overcame the doubts by building working prototypes.[5][7]
Nelson became a professor at
UC Santa Cruz in 1994. In 1999, he was the founding Director of the Center for Adaptive Optics at UCSC.[8]
In 2010, he shared the million dollar
Kavli Prize for Astrophysics for his work on segmented mirrors.[2]
"This is a most well-deserved award. Jerry Nelson first revolutionized astronomy when he invented the segmented mirror design for the Keck Telescopes; he continued with his outstanding work on adaptive optics, and he is about to transform astronomy again through his leading role in the
Thirty Meter Telescope project, his work has made possible an era of incredible discoveries in astronomy."