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| October Monthly Meeting |
| Dr. Hale Bradt, MIT |
| Thursday, Oct 12, 2006 at 8:00 PM |
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This month’s meeting will feature Dr. Hale Bradt, Professor of Physics Emeritus MIT speaking on “The Instrumental Life of An X-Ray Astronomer: Chasing Neutron Stars and Black Holes.” Within a year of earning his PhD in cosmic-ray physics in 1961, the field of celestial x-ray astronomy was born with the launch of a sounding rocket by a local research firm. Dr Bradt moved into the field a few years later and has watched it flourish ever since. He flew rudimentary equipment on sounding rockets and then more sophisticated detectors on satellites. He learned that timing precision and aperture can be as important as angular resolution and that the x-ray sky was full of surprises. Though he did not know it early on, he was looking mostly at neutron stars and black holes. In his talk, Dr. Bradt will present some of the challenges and adventures of doing x-ray astronomy in both early and more recent times.
Professor Bradt, who founded MIT’s sounding rocket program in x-ray astronomy in 1967, was co-I on the MIT SAS-3 mission (launched in 1975), a co-PI on the High-Energy Astronomy Observatory, HEAO-1 (1977), and the PI (through 2001) of the All-Sky-Monitor (ASM) instrument on the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, RXTE (1995), now in its 11th year of operation. Dr. Bradt also plays the violin, currently sings in a chorale group, used to sail his high-performance 17 ft sailboat (a Mobjack), is now writing his second textbook, Astrophysics Processes, his first being Astronomy Methods (Camb. U. Press 2004; ATMOB members, take note), and has never made an optical telescope.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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