Alan Robert Whitney ’66, SM ’67, PhD ’74, a longtime analysis scientist on the MIT Haystack Observatory who additionally served its affiliate director and interim director, died on Sept. 28 at age 81.
Whitney was a key contributor to the accomplishments and repute of Haystack Observatory, having led the event of progressive applied sciences to advance the highly effective radio science strategy of very lengthy baseline interferometry (VLBI). He ascended to the rank of MIT principal analysis scientist, served for a few years as affiliate director of the observatory, and in 2007–08 took the reins as interim director. In 2011, he was awarded an MIT Excellence award.
From an early age, Whitney displayed extraordinary expertise. Raised in Wyoming, as a excessive schooler he received the state science truthful in 1962 by constructing a satellite tv for pc telemetry receiver, which he designed and constructed from transistors and different discrete parts in a barn on his household’s dairy farm. He enrolled at MIT and accomplished a five-year grasp’s diploma by way of a cooperative internship program with Bell Laboratories, subsequently incomes his PhD in electrical engineering.
Haystack Director Phil Erickson says, “Alan’s persona and enthusiasm have been infectious, and his work represented one of the best beliefs of the Haystack and MIT analysis enterprise — progressive, curious, and exploring the frontiers of fundamental and utilized science and expertise.”
Within the late Sixties, as a part of his PhD work, he was closely concerned within the pioneering improvement of VLBI, a rare method that yielded direct measurements of continental drift and data on distant radio sources at unprecedented angular decision. A landmark paper led by Whitney demonstrated the presence of obvious superluminal (quicker than gentle) movement of radio sources, which was defined as extremely relativistic movement aligned towards the Earth. He spent the remainder of his lengthy and productive profession at Haystack, pushing ahead VLBI expertise to ever-greater heights and ever-more impactful scientific capabilities.
“Alan was a expertise pillar, a stalwart builder and worldwide ambassador of Haystack, and a number one determine of the VLBI geodetic group who impressed generations of scientists and engineers,” says Pedro Elosegui, chief of the Haystack geodesy group. “He contributed basically to the imaginative and prescient and design of the VLBI Geodetic Observing System, outlining a path to a next-generation VLBI system with unprecedented new capabilities to handle rising house geodesy science wants similar to world sea-level rise.”
The early days of VLBI demanded heroic and grueling efforts, touring the world with unique gadgets in hand-carried baggage, mounting and dismounting hundreds of magnetic tapes each couple of minutes for hours on finish, troubleshooting complicated and delicate instrumentation, and writing extremely specialised software program for the mainframe computer systems of the day. Whitney was totally engaged on all these fronts. By the early Nineteen Eighties, the Mark III recording and correlation programs, whose improvement was led by Whitney, have been established because the state-of-the-art in VLBI expertise, and a normal round which the worldwide VLBI group coalesced.
Whitney later led the transition to VLBI disk-based recording. Specialised and sturdy Mark V programs optimized for transport logistics and dealing with have been transferred to trade for commercialization, main as soon as once more to widespread world adoption of Haystack-developed VLBI expertise. Persistently throughout all these developments, Whitney recognized and exploited essentially the most related and sensible rising applied sciences for the Haystack VLBI mission in {hardware}, software program, and computing infrastructure.
Within the latter a part of his profession, Whitney continued to innovate, pushing the technical boundaries of VLBI. A key advance was the Mark 6 (Mk6) recording system, able to but quicker recording, larger sensitivity, and extra robustness. The Mk6 recorders’ important functionality allowed the creation of the Occasion Horizon Telescope, which famously yielded the primary picture of the shadow of a black gap. Mk6 recorders are actually used to routinely file knowledge roughly 100,000 occasions quicker than the pc tapes used initially of his profession.
As a senior technical and scientific chief, Whitney supplied broad management and session to Haystack, and labored on a variety of tasks exterior of the VLBI world. He served as interim Haystack director from January 2007 till a everlasting director was appointed in September 2008. He additionally engaged with the event mission for the worldwide Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia, centered on frontier analysis learning early universe improvement. Whitney assumed the function of MWA mission director from 2008 till teams in Australia took over the development section of the mission a number of years later. Till his full retirement in 2012, Whitney continued to supply invaluable technical insights and assist at Haystack, and was a trusted and clever counsel to the Haystack Director’s Workplace. In 2020, Whitney was a co-recipient of the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Basic Physics awarded to the Occasion Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
Alan Whitney was a top-notch technologist with a broad perspective that allowed him to information Haystack to a long time of influential management within the improvement and refinement of the VLBI method. His dedication at MIT to the observatory, its individuals, and its mission have been a supply of inspiration to many at Haystack and nicely past. He was broadly admired for the readability of his thought, the sharpness of his mind, and his genial and pleasant nature. His quite a few native, nationwide, and world colleagues will really feel his absence.
