Tom Gehrels

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Tom Gehrels (born Feb 21, 1925, Haarlem) is a Dutch-American astronomer.

He helped to set up the Spacewatch program for finding near-Earth asteroids. He has discovered a number of comets, including periodic comets 64P/Swift-Gehrels, 78P/Gehrels, 82P/Gehrels, and 90P/Gehrels. He has also discovered over 3000 asteroids, including the Apollo asteroids 1864 Daedalus and 5011 Ptah, and the Amor asteroid 4587 Rees, as well as dozens of Trojan asteroids.

Most of his later asteroid discoveries were made jointly with the husband and wife team of Cornelis Johannes van Houten and Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld. He did a sky survey using the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory and shipped the plates to the two Dutch astronomers at Leiden Observatory, who analyzed them for new asteroids. The trio are jointly credited with several thousand discoveries.

During World War II Gehrels was a member of the Dutch resistance, and he has interviewed surviving political prisoners who were forced to build V-1 and V-2 rockets under the supervision of Wernher von Braun. He has charged that von Braun bears greater responsibility and guilt for harsh treatment of prisoners than his official "sanitized" biography would imply. [1]

[edit] Books

On the Glassy Sea: An Astronomer's Journey, Tom Gehrels, ISBN 0-88318-598-9