Robert Weber (astronomer)


Robert Weber was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets who ran the precursor to the LINEAR project shortly before his retirement in 1996. Data were collected by manually entering telescope pointing positions and requesting an image save. Searching twenty fields was a taxing experience. They did have automatic object detection working, but no starfield matching at that time.
The inner main-belt asteroid 6181 Bobweber, discovered by Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1986, was named in his honour on 21 March 2008..

Career

Weber graduated from the MIT Department of Physics in 1959, and was with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington for 34 years. He also worked on sounding rockets, and interplanetary particles and fields with the Helios, Voyager, and IMP programmes.
He led the team that developed the prototype for the Air Force GEODSS deep space satellite tracking network. He is also responsible for the project that led to the development of the CCID16 CCD chip used in the LINEAR cameras, a natural consequence of earlier work in solid state physics.

Discovered minor planets

Confirmation of the following publications can be found at the following websites: