HEROES OF SPACE
LYMAN SPITZER
The father of the space telescope
© NASA
A natural and passionate student, Spitzer earned a place at Yale University, where he studied physics.He also spent a year studying at Cambridge University and entered Princeton, gaining a doctorate in astrophysics under the mentorship of Henry Norris Russell. He took up a teaching position at Yale in 1939, and when World War II broke out, Spitzer engaged in underwater sound research as part of the team that developed sonar. It was when he returned to Yale after the war that he had the idea that would place him firmly in the history books. In 1946, Spitzer conceived the notion of putting a telescope in outer space, theorising that if the device was in space it would bypass any issues of blurring as a result of being in our atmosphere.