Remembering Prof. Ronald N. Bracewell

by H. Paul Shuch, Executive Director Emeritus

The SETI League, Inc.

For Immediate Release

LITTLE FERRY, NJ.., 14 August 2007 -- The SETI community has lost
another of its pioneers, with the passing on 13 August 2007 of noted
radio astronomer Ronald N. Bracewell. At the time of his death, Prof.
Bracewell was the Lewis M. Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering
(Emeritus) at Stanford University, where he had taught since 1955.

Born in Sydney, Australia in 1921, Ron Bracewell served during the
Second World War as a microwave and radar engineer at the Radiophysics
Laboratory of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization (CSIRO), Sydney, before completing his Ph.D. in Physics at
Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. He returned to CSIRO as a Senior
Research Officer at the Radiophysics Laboratory, prior to coming to the
US in 1954, first lecturing in the Astronomy Department at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the following year moving across
the bay to Stanford.

In 1955, Bracewell co-authored with J.L. Pawsey, his former supervisor
at CSIRO, _Radio_Astronomy_, probably the first textbook in this
emerging discipline. Other significant publications include the standard
EE textbook _The_Fourier_Transform_and_its_Applications_ (1965), the
popular SETI book _The_Galactic_Club:_Intelligent_Life_in_Outer_Space_
(1974), several works on image processing, and two books on trees found
in the vicinity of the Stanford campus. Ron strongly believed in the
possibility that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would explore
the cosmos by constructing autonomous robotic probes, and today these
hypothesized exploration vehicles are universally known as Bracewell Probes.

At Stanford in 1961, Ron Bracewell and his grad student Govind Swarup
(later to become director of the India Centre for Radio Astrophysics)
constructed an innovative 4 GHz spectroheliograph on the Stanford
campus, a pencil-beam interferometer with micro-steradian resolution.
Consisting of 32 3-meter dishes in a Mills Cross arrangement, that
design inspired The SETI League's own Very Small Array (VSA) project, to
which Ron contributed design expertise. My first direct contact with Ron
Bracewell occurred upon the dismantling of the Stanford
spectroheliograph in the late 1970s, with Ron contributing one of the
dishes to San Jose City College. I was teaching there at the time, and
this Stanford dish became my students' first radio telescope (as well as
a forerunner of today's Project Argus instruments).

Ron Bracewell had a strong interest in Optical SETI, and presented
papers at each of the OSETI conferences sponsored by SPIE, the
international photo-optical society. He introduced significant
modifications to the Fast Fourier Transform which facilitate improved
image processing, and developed algorithms widely used by SETI League
members for candidate signal analysis. I shall remember Professor
Bracewell every time I fire up my Digital Signal Processing computers.

Largely using radio telescopes and optical telescopes, SETI scientists
seek to determine whether humankind is alone in the universe. Since
Congress terminated NASA's SETI funding in 1993, The SETI League and
other scientific groups have privatized the research. Amateur and
professional scientists interested in participating in the search for
intelligent alien life, and citizens wishing to help support it, should
email join_at_setileague_dot_org, check the SETI League Web site at
http://www.setileague.org/, send a fax to +1 (201) 641-1771, or contact
The SETI League, Inc. membership hotline at +1 (800) TAU-SETI. Be sure
to provide us with a postal address to which we will mail further
information. The SETI League, Inc. is a membership-supported, non-profit
[501(c)(3)], educational and scientific corporation dedicated to the
scientific Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.

P.S. Tearsheets are always appreciated. Thank you.

-end-

--
H. Paul Shuch, Ph.D.
Executive Director Emeritus, The SETI League, Inc.
http://www.setileague.org n6tx@setileague.org

"We Know We're Not Alone!"