Yesterday the geologist and planetary scientist Bruce Murray died. He was director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and one of the founders of the Planetary Society.
Bruce Churchill Murray was born on November 30, 1931 in New York City, New York. He earned a Ph.D. in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955, for some years he worked for Standard Oil and served in the U.S. Air Force for two years. In 1960 he started his career as a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
At Caltech, Bruce Murray started getting interested in extraterrestrial geology and to work with the university’s telescopes using them to discover the characteristics of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars.
In the ’70s, Bruce Murray worked at the first Martian missions managed by JPL, the Mariner 3 and 4, and then at the Mariner 6, 7 and 9 missions using the images taken by them to begin the construction of the geological history of Mars. He also worked in the mission of the Mariner 10 space probe, sent to study Venus and Mercury.
In 1976, Bruce Murray became director of JPL, managed by Caltech for NASA. In this capacity, he was important to promote the recruitment of female staff also among engineers but also in the management of a shrinking budget. Nevertheless, in those years there were the Viking missions to Mars and the Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in their extraordinary exploration of the solar system that continues today.
In 1979, Bruce Murray founded the Planetary Society with astronomer Carl Sagan and space engineer Louis Friedman. It’s a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting the exploration of the solar system, the search of celestial bodies of the NEO (Near Earth Objects) type and the search for extraterrestrial life.
In 1982, Bruce Murray left the JPL to return to teaching at Caltech, where he became professor emeritus in 2001. Over the years he has lent his enormous scientific expertise to various organizations in the U.S.A. and around the world.
Bruce Murray had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for a long time and yesterday died because of its complications. He’s survived by his wife Suzanne, their children and grandchildren but he leaves a huge scientific legacy.
