NY Times Obituary for Robert Leighton

NY Times Obituary for Robert Leighton

March 14, 1997

Robert Leighton, 77, Physicist Involved in Space Exploration

By Karen Freeman

Robert B. Leighton, a wide ranging physicist whose work on telescopes and space exploration gave astronomers new views of the universe, died on Sunday at a nursing home in Pasadena, California, where he lived. He was 77. The cause was neurological disease, said his wife, Marge.

Telescopes invented by Leighton, called Leighton dishes, straddle the line between light and radio telescopes, allowing astronomers to analyze a relatively unexplored area of the electromagnetic spectrum. Leighton is also known for discovering five-minute oscillations in local surface velocities of the Sun, work that opened up a research field called solar seismology. And he was the scientist in charge of the first successful Mars probe, which transmitted close-up pictures of the cratered surface of that planet in 1965.

In an eclectic career, Leighton was drawn from one intriguing problem after another, moving the field forward before moving on himself. “In any new venture he went into,” said Dr. Gerry Neugebauer, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, “he skimmed the cream off, then went on to another venture. With his very inquisitive mind, every funny effect that you’d see in nature he’d try to explain.”

Leighton, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, began his long career at

Caltech with groundbreaking work on particle physics, but he turned his attention to astronomy in the 1950s, inventing cameras that picked up the solar oscillations.

In the 1960s, he was the team leader at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Mars probes called Mariner 4, 6 and 7. For the first close-ups from Mars, he helped develop a digital television system for use in deep space. “He was Mr. Television during the Mariner days,” said Dr. Charles Peck, Chairman of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech. When Mariner 4’s images of Mars reached Earth, they were discouraging for scientists hoping for signs of life. Leighton’s research team, while not ruling out the possibility of life, concluded that conditions of the surface of Mars indicated that the planet did not have the free water presumed necessary for life.

Leighton was also interested in ways to build large, inexpensive telescopes. He worked on a number of projects in the 1960s and ‘70s, building innovative telescopes for Mount Wilson, Mauna Kea and the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. He built telescopes that could analyze radiation from space with wavelengths of millimeters or submillimeters, which includes infrared and microwave radiation, between the visible spectrum and radio waves.

“This is one of the last regions that’s unexplored,” Neugebauer said. “It’s just being explored now.”

A physics text book by Leighton, “Principles of Modern Physics” (McGraw-Hill, 1959) was a standard in the field for decades, and in the 1960s he also helped edit the three volumes of “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” (Addison-Wesley).

Robert Benjamin Leighton was born on September 10, 1919, in Detroit. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Caltech. He did research there after receiving his Ph. D. in 1947 and joined the faculty in 1949. He retired from research about 1990 and was the Valentine Professor of Physics Emeritus at the time of his death. Leighton is survived by his wife; two sons from his first marriage, to Alice Leighton, Alan, of Bochum, Germany, and Ralph, of Tiburon, Calif., and two grandchildren.