Aden Baker Meinel, astronomer, optical scientist, atmospheric physicist, telescope designer and founding Director of Kitt Peak National Observatory and the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona died at Henderson, Nevada on 2 October 2011.
Born in Pasadena, California on 25 November 1922, Meinel's interest in astronomy began in High School. By age 18 Aden was working at the Mt. Wilson Observatory optical shop. At age 19 Meinel entered Caltech as a sophomore. In 1942 he dropped out of school to join the Caltech Navy rocket program, and by 1944 he was designing rocket launchers and had become a Naval Ensign. The Navy sent him to Europe in 1944 to investigate the German V2 rocket factory at Nordhausen and their underwater rocket testing facility at Toplitzsee. He convinced German rocket scientists to come to the US and provided technical advice to the Navy on rocket hardware to ship to the US.
Meinel returned from Europe and was admitted to the graduate school of astronomy at the UC, Berkeley where he used three years of the GI bill to earn his PhD in Astronomy. For his Ph.D. dissertation he designed and built a Schmidt telescope to make the first observations of the infrared OH emission bands in the atmosphere and demonstrate that aurora were produced by solar protons. He graduated with the PhD in 1947 and accepted an appointment to Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago.
In 1955, the NSF appointed Aden to search potential sites for a national observatory to provide telescope access for all astronomers in the country. He was the founding Director of the new Kitt Peak National Observatory, where he invented a slumping process for the honeycomb Pyrex mirror to build an innovative 84-inch telescope.
In 1960 Aden became Director of the University of Arizona's (UA) Steward Observatory and astronomy program. He designed the UA-Smithsonian MMT that proved that segmented telescope mirrors were practical. Meinel started the expansion of the UA astronomy department that has led today to the Large Binocular Telescope and Dr. Roger Angel's mirror lab, which has produced many of the world's large telescope mirrors.
Aden recognized the need for an interdisciplinary academic center of excellence in optical science. In 1964 Aden became the founding director of the UA's Optical Science Center and created a graduate degree program in optics. During his nine-year leadership a 77,000 square foot building was built, the department grew from 4 to 25 faculty and the number of students grew to 100. Today, the College of Optical Sciences has over 1,500 graduates and 100 faculty teaching over 90 courses.
Aden Meinel joined JPL in 1983 to work on concepts for a 50-m diameter submillimeter segmented space telescope. His work laid the foundation for today's James Webb Space Telescope. In 1986 the JPL director, Dr. Lew Allen, asked Aden for his ideas on future missions for NASA. Aden concluded that although extremely difficult, the characterization of exoplanets using space telescopes was feasible. These efforts became the NASA Exoplanet Program today.
After his official retirement from JPL in 1993 he worked on the design of the Keck telescopes' interferometer and on the proposed Caltech-University of Calif. 30-m telescope. In 2002 he published two papers on lightweight space telescopes built using blazed high order diffractive membranes.
During an active research career that spanned almost 70 years, Aden Meinel published over 200 papers along with 6 books, covering pioneering work in solar energy, atmospheric science, telescope design, and a catalog of emission lines in astronomical objects. From the OSA Aden Meinel received the Adolph Lomb medal (1952) for being the most promising young optical scientist under the age of 35 and the IVES medal (1980). From AAS he was awarded the first Helen B. Warner prize (1954) and also the van Biesbroeck Prize in 1990. From the SPIE Aden was the recipient of Society's Gold Medal, the Rudolph Kingslake Medal (1994&2001) and the Goddard Award (1984). Aden received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1993).
Aden conceived many successful projects, laying a firm technical and scientific foundation for others to carry on while his interests jumped to the next amazing project. The early development of rocket science, the discovery of the atmospheric OH emission, the founding KPNO, planning the future of Steward Observatory, founding the College of Optical Sciences and leading several innovative studies in space optics at JPL were the foundations of a remarkable life. His wife and long time research collaborator Marjorie Pettit Meinel died in June 2008.
