In The Field

AGU: Steve Ostro RIP

The downside of bumping into old friends and acquaintances, as you do constantly at a meeting like this, is that you will occasionally hear sad news. Today I learned that Steve Ostro of JPL had died at the weekend, of complications related to cancer. Steve was a pioneer in the radar mapping of asteroids, leading a team that got most of the firsts in this field. As he told David Chandler in our feature on near-earth asteroid hunting last summer:

Observations of near-Earth objects were growing … and we started getting some radar opportunities on newly discovered objects. In 1979, I met all the asteroid people and got very enthused, and then I was pretty sold on asteroids and wrote my own observing proposals. Within a year I was basically doing that more than anything else.

What Steve loved about the asteroid radar studies, I remember him once telling me, was the thrill of the first look — of seeing the never-before-seen shape of what would otherwise be a featureless light on the sky take form on his screen — and of being able to get that thrill again and again. The celestial clockwork brought him new worlds to conquer on a regular basis, requiring him to go no further than a radio telescope to collect the images.

He had seen well over 300 by the time he died, and he used to get the shapes of some of the more notable ones cast in some sort of plastic. I remember his happy grin when he handed me one at a meeting some years back, and the weird feeling of holding the strange shape of a little world fragment in my hand. When I get back to London I’ll dig it out of the drawer where it’s languishing and give it a new home on my desk. Steve was a terrific scientist: enthusiastic, caustic and fun. I didn’t know him well, but I’ll miss him

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