Brian G. Marsden

Brian G. Marsden (born the August 5th 1937) is a British Astronome américano- , which is since 1978 the director of the Minor Planet Center of SAO located at Cambridge in the Massachusetts.

It specialized in the Celestial mechanics and the Astrométrie, collecting data on the positions of the Astéroïde S and the Comet S and calculating their orbits, often starting from reduced observational information.

Marsden helped to find lost comets and asteroids. Certain asteroids and comets discovered in the past were " perdus" because not enough observational data had been collected at the time to determine an enough reliable orbit to know where to seek at the time of future observations. Sometimes, the discovery of a new object proves to be in fact the redécouverte of a lost object, which can be proven by calculating its orbit while going up in the past and by comparing the positions calculated with the positions of the lost object recorded before. In the case of the comets, the exercise is particularly difficult because of the nongravitionnelles forces which can affect their orbits (emission of gas jets by the core of comet), but Marsden specialized in the calculation of such not-gravitational forces. He in particular successfully predicts the return in 1992 of lost periodic comet Swift-Tuttle.

He proposed a time that Pluton could be regarded at the same time as a Planet and like a minor planet and assigned the number of asteroid 10000 to him; however, this proposal was not adopted.

Honorary distinctions

Rewards

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