Robert Weber (astronomer)

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Asteroids discovered: 7

(8409) 1995 WB43	November 28, 1995
(11602) 1995 ST54	September 28, 1995
(12005) 1996 KA3	May 19, 1995
(23612) 1996 BJ4	January 22, 1996
(26906) 1996 BH4	January 22, 1996
(37687) 1995 QB10	August 30, 1995
(39645) 1995 QC10	August 31, 1995

Robert Weber is an American astronomer who ran the precursor to the LINEAR project shortly before his retirement in 1996. Data were collected by manually entering telescope pointing positions and requesting an image save. Searching twenty fields was a taxing experience. They did have automatic object detection working, but no starfield matching at that time.

He should not be confused with the Technical University of Vienna's Robert Weber, or the U.S. Court of International Trade's Robert Weber.

Weber graduated from the MIT Department of Physics in 1959 [1], and was with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington for 34 years (1962–1996) [2]. He also worked on sounding rockets, and interplanetary particles and fields with the Helios, Voyager, and IMP programmes.

He led the team that developed the prototype for the Air Force GEODSS deep space satellite tracking network (the two LINEAR telescopes are GEODSS assets that were originally destined for Portugal). He is also responsible for the project that led to the development of the CCID16 CCD chip used in the LINEAR cameras, a natural consequence of earlier work in solid state physics.