Brian G. Marsden

Brian Geoffrey Marsden (born 5 August 1937) is a British astronomer, the longtime director of the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

He specializes in celestial mechanics and astrometry, collecting data on the positions of asteroids and comets and computing their orbits, often from minimal observational information and providing their future positions on International Astronomical Union (IAU) circulars. In addition to serving as MPC director since 1978, he served as the director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) from 1968 to 1999.

Marsden has helped recover once-lost comets and asteroids. Some asteroid and comet discoveries of previous decades were "lost" because not enough observational data had been obtained at the time to determine a reliable enough orbit to know where to look for re-observation at future dates. Occasionally, a newly discovered object turns out to be a rediscovery of a previously lost object, which can be determined by calculating its orbit backwards into the past and matching calculated positions with the previously recorded positions of the lost object. In the case of comets this is especially tricky because of nongravitational forces that can affect their orbits (one of which is emission of jets of gas from the comet nucleus), but Marsden has specialized in calculating such nongravitational forces. Notably, he successfully predicted the 1992 return of the once-lost periodic comet Swift-Tuttle.

He once proposed that Pluto should be cross-listed as both a planet and a minor planet and assigned the asteroid number 10000; however, this proposal was not accepted. A similar proposal was, however, finally accepted in 2006 when Pluto was designated minor planet 134340 and also declared a dwarf planet.

Honours

Awards
*George Van Biesbroeck Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1989)
*Brouwer Award of the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (1995) [http://dda.harvard.edu/brouwer_award/brouw95.html]
*Royal Astronomical Society Award for Service to Astronomy and Geophysics (2006)Named after him
*Asteroid 1877 Marsden

External links

* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E2D91F30F930A25750C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all "Man in the News; A Cheery Herald of Fear: Brian Geoffrey Marsden" in "The New York Times" (13 March 1998)]
* [http://www.britastro.org/jbaa/archive/marsden.htm "1997 XF₁₁ – the true story" in "The Journal of the British Astronomical Association" Vol. 109, No.1 (February 1999)]