The death of Herbert Gursky on 1 December
2006 from gastric cancer has deprived his family of a husband and father, the scientific community
of an esteemed colleague and friend, and the nation of a dedicated public servant.
"Herb," as his friends
called him, was born in the Bronx, New York, on 27 May 1930. After earning a BS in physics from the University
of Florida in 1951, he received an MS in physics from Vanderbilt University in 1953. Under George
T. Reynolds, he obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 1959 with a thesis on cosmic rays.
He then became an instructor in the physics department of Columbia University, where he worked
until 1961.
I first met Herb during
my stay at Princeton in 1958, where we joined forces to search for a nonexistent particle with 500
electron masses. We worked day and night on the project, which brought us very close. In 1961 Herb
joined my small group at American Science and Engineering (AS&E) in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
which had begun in 1959 to work in x-ray astronomy with sounding rockets. He immediately became
involved with the construction and launch of our second and third rocket payloads, sponsored by
the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. It was on the third launch, on 18 June 1962, that
we discovered the first x-ray star, Sco X-1. From that moment on, astronomy was never the same, and
we were given the privilege of working in a new and exciting field.
The next product of our
collaboration was a document we submitted to NASA in September 1963 to seek its support in our program.
We decided that our previous proposals had been too timid, and we prepared a five-year plan that
included rocket launches and small satellites and culminated in 1968 with the flight of a 1.2-meter
x-ray telescope, which was my particular fixation. It is remarkable, though not coincidental,
that the development of x-ray astronomy followed our plan, although we had to wait 36 years to see
it fully implemented.
Herb's greatest observational
contribution to x-ray astronomy, and the one of which he was most proud, occurred in 1967 when he
designed and directed the construction of a novel rocket payload using two of Minoru Oda's modulation
collimators. This collaborative AS&E and MIT experiment determined the position of the x-ray
source Sco X-1 with the unprecedented accuracy of five arcseconds, making it possible to identify
its optical counterpart, a 13th-magnitude star with a novalike spectrum. This finding suggested
that Sco X-1 could be a binary system, but the discovery of radio pulsars by Antony Hewish and Jocelyn
Bell in the same year swayed theorists to look at models based on isolated spinning neutron stars.
It was understood later that Sco X-1 was a binary system.
Herb participated in the
analysis and interpretation of the Uhuru satellite data. He realized that the optical
counterparts of x-ray sources need not be as dim as that of Sco X-1 and also immediately appreciated
the significance of the discovery of extended emission from clusters of galaxies. He was the principal
investigator for an experiment on the first of NASA's high-energy astronomy observatories, HEAO-1,
and for US participation in the Dutch satellite ANS, which discovered the x-ray bursters.
During a one-day session
at AS&E, Herb and I also came up with the idea of good geometry detection for x-rays. Later patented
by the company, the technique provides the basis for airport scanning machines.
Herb was appointed vice
president for research at AS&E in 1967. After joining the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
in 1973, he was appointed a professor of the practice of astronomy at Harvard University in 1975
and became associate director of the division of optical and infrared astronomy at the Harvard–Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics in 1976. Herb supervised the completion of the Multiple Mirror Telescope,
a joint program of SAO and the University of Arizona, from 1975 to 1981.
He joined the US Naval Research
Laboratory (NRL) in 1981 as superintendent of its space science division and chief scientist of
the E. O. Hulburt Center for Space Research. For 25 years Herb supervised a staff of more than 50 PhD
scientists in the development of numerous programs. Their activities spanned the gamut from solar
physics to atmospheric sciences, meteorology, and high-energy astrophysics. The programs culminated
in 2006 with the delivery of the NRL instrument for the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope
to study the high-energy universe and with the launch of NRL instruments on the Japanese satellite
Solar-B and the NASA satellite STEREO.
In recognition for his
work, Herb received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1978 and the NRL Alan Berman
Research Publication Award.
Apart from his brilliant
scientific achievements, Herb was a scientist's scientist. His warm personality, modest approach,
integrity, and wisdom were of great value to astronomy and to the nation, and we will certainly miss
him.
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