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 Giuseppe 'Bepi' Colombo: Grandfather of the fly-by
Colombo was a mathematician and engineer of astonishing imagination, whose bald head and grey moustache in his later years were a familiar sight in the corridors of both ESA and NASA. Giuseppe Colombo was born in 1920 in Padua, Italy, where he attended primary and secondary schools. After graduating from the University of Pisa in Mathematics in 1944, he returned to Padua where he worked as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Theoretical Mechanics at the University of Padua.
In 1955 he became Full Professor of Applied Mechanics at the Faculty of Engineering. In his career he lectured on Mechanical Vibrations and Celestial Mechanics, as well as Space Vehicles and Rockets during his last years.
An analytical study conducted by JPL confirmed Colombo's suggestion. The study showed that by careful choice of the Mercury fly-by point, a gravitational-assist manoeuvre could be made that would return the spacecraft to Mercury six months later. Almost everything known until now about the planet Mercury comes from these orbits of Mariner 10 in 1974-75, which were inspired by Colombo's calculations. Apart from his work on Mercury, Colombo invented the concept of tethered satellites. In 1974, he introduced the idea of using of a long tether to support a spacecraft from an orbiting platform.
Colombo and one of his colleagues, Mario Grossi, approached NASA and the Italian Space Agency with the idea, which was eventually developed into the Tethered Satellite System (TSS). The TSS was launched in 1992 aboard the Space Shuttle mission STS-46, and again in 1996 on STS-75.
To commemorate this great scientist, ESA created a 'Colombo fellowship' in 1985, to be granted to European scientists working in related astronautical fields. An asteroid discovered by the Sormano Astronomical Observatory in Italy, asteroid number 10387, was also named in his honour. Last update: 18 June 2009
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