How This Now Retired Scientist Helped NASA Hugely

He worked for NASA for over fifty years, but now William Borucki has left the American space agency. From this weekend he can enjoy his retirement. And not unjustly, because the scientist leaves behind a load of valuable knowledge.

The name Borucki probably won’t ring a bell with everyone. Nevertheless, there is a good chance that his work will be known to most. Borucki was one of the driving forces behind the Kepler project during his career at the American space agency. Thanks to that project, NASA has found no fewer than a thousand exoplanets in recent years. These are planets orbiting stars other than our sun.

After completing his master’s degree in Physics, Borucki joined NASA in 1962. There he spent years developing the heat shields for the Apollo program, which was intended to put the first man on the moon. The shields were to ensure that the astronauts could return home safely without being absorbed into the atmosphere.

After working on the Apollo heat shields, Borucki began studying meteorology. In this he eventually obtained his master’s degree in 1982. In the same year he started to get stuck in the occurrence of thunderstorms. He used data from satellites to find out what thunderstorms were like on our planet and those on other planets, including Jupiter, Venus and Saturn’s moon Titan. He developed various models for this.

Gradually, the scientist’s attention turned to other planets. He started working at NASA with the so-called Transit Method. This means that scientists observe stars to see if planets are racing past them. Borucki specialized in the method and later came up with a way that space telescopes could search for so-called exoplanets in a similar way.

The researcher wanted telescopes in space to look for the planets, but the first two proposals for this were rejected by NASA. The first time, in 1992, the technology was not yet suitable. Two years later, it turned out that the project would cost too much money.

Fortunately for Borucki and his team, the first exoplanet was found near a star similar to ours in 1995. This proved the effectiveness of the then detection method. Therefore, another research proposal followed in 1996, but it was again rejected. The technology would not yet be able to observe and measure thousands of stars simultaneously.

Borucki didn’t stop there. He and other researchers built an observatory on Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California. With a special telescope, the Vulcan, he showed that it was indeed possible to observe thousands of stars simultaneously. Finally, his plan to study exoplanets was accepted in 2000.

The work resulted in the Kepler satellite, which was only launched in 2009 due to financial turmoil. Thanks to the spacecraft, more than a thousand exoplanets have been found around other stars so far. At the beginning of this year, thanks to Kepler, scientists found another 11.2 billion year old planetary system with eventually five exoplanets. It is the oldest planetary system of the galaxy that we know so far.

Borucki will be able to enjoy his retirement from Saturday after 53 years of service to NASA. Many praise him for his leadership, his vision and his research. One astronaut says, “He will leave with such esteem that not only will his legacy be celebrated, but his work will be remembered as the beginning of a new chapter in the history of science and the human imagination.”