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1993-05-03
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PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
For Immediate Release
Gerald S. Levy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
has been named recipient of the Charles Stark Draper Award by
the International Aeronautical Federation for his innovative
work in a 3-year-long astronomical experiment.
Levy, of the science office of the
Telecommunication and Data Acquisition organization, will be
honored for a new radio-astronomy technique using an orbiting
satellite and ground antennas in Australia and Japan.
Conducting experiments from 1986 through 1988, Levy
and his colleagues were able to obtain better resolutions of
three quasars than that possible in any ground-based radio
studies at the same wavelength.
Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects, are among the
most distant objects known.
Levy led an international team of scientists and
engineers which designed the technique for combining data
from radio telescopes on the ground with data from an antenna
on the satellite.
The team used NASA's Deep Space Network 70-meter
antenna in Australia, and in Japan, the Institute of Space
and Astronautical Science's 64-meter antenna at Usuda, a 45-
meter dish of the Tokyo Astrophysical Observatory at Nobeyama
and a 26-meter antenna at Kashima of the Japanese Radio î
Research Laboratory, along with the tracking and relay
satellite, TDRSS, managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center. The data were correlated at the Haystack Observatory
in Westford, Mass.
The technique, called very long baseline
interferometry, or VLBI, theoretically creates an antenna
with resolution equivalent to the effective distance between
the antennas, in this case a distance greater than the
diameter of the Earth.
The award is to be presented October 14 during the
IAF Congress to be held in Bangalore, India. Levy will
present a paper at the meeting on the latest results of the
experiment.
The Draper Award is a one-time award initiated by
the Paris-based foundation at its congress last October in
Brighton, England. It carries a $1,000 endowment offered by
the Charles Stark Laboratory Inc., of Cambridge, Mass.
Draper was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
scientist who developed the first inertial guidance systems
for aircraft, marine vessels and rockets.
His laboratory at MIT was separated from the
university in 1973 and became a private institution for
government research.
Levy received his B.S. in physics at University of
Wisconsin in 1952 and his M.S. in ionospheric physics at
Pennsylvania State University in 1956.
He was earlier awarded the NASA Exceptional Service î
Medal, and the NASA Medal For Exceptional Scientific
Achievement. He joined JPL in 1959 and since 1985 has been
Telecommunications and Data Acquisition Observatory Manager.
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