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ILRS Technology and Engineering Activities
The service collects, merges, analyzes, archives and distributes Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) and Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) observation data sets to satisfy the objectives of scientific, engineering, and operational applications and programs. The basic observables are the precise two-way time-of-flight of an ultrashort laser pulse to a retroreflector array on a satellite or the Moon and the one-way time of flight to a space borne receiver (transponder). These data sets are made available to the community and are also used by the ILRS to generate fundamental data products, including: accurate satellite ephemerides, Earth orientation parameters, three-dimensional coordinates and velocities of the ILRS tracking stations, time-varying geocenter coordinates, static and time-varying coefficients of the Earth's gravity field, fundamental physical constants, lunar ephemerides and librations, and lunar orientation parameters.
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Tom received his B.S. in Engineering Physics and his Ph.D. in Astro-Geophysics from the University of Colorado in 1961 and 1967 respectively. From 1966 to 1968, he served as Chief of the Astronomy Branch at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and as Project Scientist on the Spacelab Coronagraph. At GSFC, where he moved in 1968, Tom received numerous NASA awards for his pioneering work on Radio Astronomy Explorer 1 and 2 and several generations of Very Long Baseline Interferometry systems. Tom developed the Totally Accurate Clock (TAC), an inexpensive GPS timing receiver that found widespread use in a number of global networks. Tom was named a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 1991 and a Fellow of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) in 1999. Tom was also a pioneer in amateur and digital radio; he designed and flew several low cost satellites for relaying amateur radio messages around the globe and is a past president of AMSAT. He was one of only 50 initial inductees into the CQ Amateur Radio Hall of Fame, a list which included such engineering luminaries and inventors as Guglielmo Marconi (radio), Samuel Morse (telegraph), Nikola Tesla (HF generators and radio), and John Bardeen and William Schockley (transistor). Tom retired from GSFC in 2001 but remained active in Amateur Radio activities.
Those of us who worked with Tom during the Crustal Dynamics period remember him as a brilliant mind, a very interesting and sometimes caustic character, but someone who was kind, supportive, and very helpful to those of us around him. We will miss him.
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Many meetings have been canceled or postponed due to COVID-19. Please see the Meetings page for futher information.