Robert Wilson

For the American astronomer, see Robert Woodrow Wilson Sir Robert Wilson (16 April 1927 – 2 September 2002) was the son of a Durham miner. He studied physics at King's College, Durham and obtained his PhD in Edinburgh, where he worked at the Royal Observatory on stellar spectra. He was an astronomer, who fully embraced the opportunities provided by the space age and he was one of the pioneers who laid the groundwork for the development of the Great Space Observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope.In 1959 Wilson joined the Plasma Spectroscopy Group at Harwell where he was responsible for measuring the temperature in the Zeta experiment, confirming that it had not been hot enough to have produced thermonuclear fusion. As head of the Plasma Spectroscopy Group at Culham, he led a programme of rocket observations of ultraviolet spectra of the sun and stars. By placing telescopes on rockets and satellites it was possible to avoid the absorption of the ultraviolet light by the Earth's atmosphere and gain a great deal of information about the hot plasmas especially in the Sun's chromosphere and corona. Wilson then became involved in the European Space Research Organization's first astronomy satellite, the TD-1A mission, and led the British collaboration with Belgium in the S2/68 experiment which in 1972 conducted the first all sky survey in the ultraviolet. Wilson was best known for his role as "father" of the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) satellite. This had started life in 1964 as a proposal to ESRO for a Large Astronomical Satellite, which proved too expensive and studies were abandoned in 1967. Wilson, however, convinced the UK authorities to continue the study, and achieved a radical redesign which at the same time had greater capability and was simpler and therefore cheaper. This concept was called the Ultraviolet Astronomical Satellite (UVAS). It was again submitted to ESRO in November 1968 but despite a favourable assessment report was not accepted