James Barney Pollack (July 9, 1938 – June 13, 1994) was an American
astrophysicist who worked for
NASA's
Ames Research Center.
Pollack was born on July 9, 1938 in
New York City, and was brought up in
Woodmere, Long Island
Woodmere is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County, New York, United States. The population was 17,554 at the 2016 census.
Woodmere is one of the Long Island communities known as the Five Towns, w ...
by a
Jewish family that was in the women's garment business. He was a
valedictorian of his class at
Lawrence High School and graduated from
Princeton University in 1960. He then received his master's in nuclear physics at
University of California, Berkeley in 1962 and his Ph.D from Harvard in 1965, where he was a student of
Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on ext ...
. He was openly gay.
Dorion Sagan
Dorion Sagan (born 1959) is an American essayist, fiction writer, poet, and theorist of ecology. He has written and co-authored books on culture, art, literature, evolution, and the history and philosophy of science, including ''Cosmic Apprentice, ...
told how his father came to the defense of Pollack's partner in a problem with obtaining treatment at the university health service
emergency department
An emergency department (ED), also known as an accident and emergency department (A&E), emergency room (ER), emergency ward (EW) or casualty department, is a medical treatment facility specializing in emergency medicine, the acute care of pati ...
.
Pollack specialized in
atmospheric science
Atmospheric science is the study of the Atmosphere of Earth, Earth's atmosphere and its various inner-working physical processes. Meteorology includes atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric physics with a major focus on weather forecasting. Climat ...
, especially the atmospheres of
Mars and
Venus. He investigated the possibility of
terraforming Mars, the extinction of the
dinosaurs and the possibility of
nuclear winter since the 1980s with
Christopher McKay
Dr Christopher P. McKay (born 1954) is an American planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, studying planetary atmospheres, astrobiology, and terraforming. McKay majored in physics at Florida Atlantic University, where he also studied m ...
and Sagan. The work of Pollack et al. (1996) on the formation of giant planets ("core accretion paradigm") is seen today as the standard model.
He explored the
weather on Mars using data from the
Mariner 9
Mariner 9 (Mariner Mars '71 / Mariner-I) was a robotic spacecraft that contributed greatly to the exploration of Mars and was part of the NASA Mariner program. Mariner 9 was launched toward Mars on May 30, 1971 from LC-36B at Cape Canaveral Air ...
spacecraft and the
Viking mission. On this he based ground-breaking computer simulations of winds, storms, and the general climate on that planet. An overview of Pollack's scientific vita is given in the memorial talk "James B. Pollack: A Pioneer in Stardust to Planetesimals Research" held at an
Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1996 symposium.
He was a recipient of the
Gerard P. Kuiper Prize in 1989 for outstanding lifetime achievement in the field of planetary science. Pollack died at his home in
California in 1994 from a rare form of spinal cancer, at age 55.
A
crater
Crater may refer to:
Landforms
*Impact crater, a depression caused by two celestial bodies impacting each other, such as a meteorite hitting a planet
*Explosion crater, a hole formed in the ground produced by an explosion near or below the surfac ...
on Mars
was named in his honor.
References
External links
Short biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pollack, James
1938 births
1994 deaths
Planetary scientists
American astronomers
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Harvard University alumni
Deaths from spinal cancer
Deaths from cancer in California
Neurological disease deaths in California
American LGBT scientists
LGBT people from New York (state)
People from Woodmere, New York
Lawrence High School (Cedarhurst, New York) alumni
Scientists from New York (state)
20th-century LGBT people