John V. Evans (born 5 July 1933) is a British-American radio astronomer born in Manchester, England. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, and has been a professor at the

Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...

of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1960. He received the 1975 Appleton Prize. Evans showed how long-period lunar echo fading could be used to measure the ionospheric electron density. William Smith used Long Michelson interferometer observations of sources to do the same. He also showed that lunar scattering was limb-darkened. With G. N. Taylor, he bounced radar echoes off Venus in September 1959. He has performed radar studies of the Moon, Venus, etc. He also worked on detecting

Sputnik 1 Sputnik 1 (; see § Etymology) was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for t ...

with Jodrell Bank. He co-authored with T. Hagfors the classic textbook of Radar Astronomy. In 1984, Evans was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the development of remote sensing technology which has given us new understanding of the earth's upper atmosphere and the atmospheres of other planets.

References

External links

Biographical Dictionary of Great Astronomers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Evans, John V. 1933 births Living people 20th-century British astronomers 20th-century American astronomers Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty MIT Lincoln Laboratory people Alumni of the University of Manchester