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Pickering, William H
Pickering
Pickering
Credit: NASA
American Chief Designer, Director JPL, 1954-1976. Under his leadership the first successful probes to earth orbit, the Moon, Venus, and Mars were designed, built, and flown (Explorer, Pioneer, Ranger, Mariner, Surveyor, Viking).

Born: 1910-12-24. Died: 2004-03-15.

William Hayward Pickering was born in Wellington, New Zealand. As a teenager, he became a local celebrity by building one of New Zealand's first crystal sets. An uncle persuaded him to enroll at a new university in California, Caltech. He obtained his bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering, then a Ph.D. in Physics there before becoming a professor of electrical engineering in 1946. In 1944 he organized the electronics efforts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to support guided missile research and development, becoming project manager for Corporal, the first operational missile JPL developed. From 1954 to 1976 he was director of JPL, which developed the first U.S. satellite (Explorer I), the first successful U.S. cislunar space probe (Pioneer IV), the Mariner flights to Venus and Mars in the early to mid-1960s, the Ranger photographic missions to the moon in 1964-65, the Surveyor lunar landings of 1966-67, and the Viking landings on Mars in 1976. Following retirement from JPL he worked in Saudi Arabia for two years, followed by the founding of his own start-up company, Lignetics. However he remained in touch with space happenings and was at JPL in January 2004 when the MER spacecraft landed on Mars.



Country: USA. Bibliography: 535, 5893.

1910 December 24 - .
1959 December 21 - .
1965 January - .
1966 August 22 - .
2004 March 15 - .

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