Gary Arnold Flandro (born March 30, 1934 in

Salt Lake City, Utah Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the Capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Utah, most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the county seat, seat of Salt Lake County, Utah, Sal ...

) is an American aerospace engineer who currently holds the Boling Chair of Excellence in Space Propulsion (Emeritus) at the

University of Tennessee Space Institute A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

. He is also the Vice President and Chief Engineer at Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories (GTL).

Life and work

Flandro earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

in 1957, his Master’s in Aeronautics from the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1960 and his Ph.D. from

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1967 under the supervision of Frank E. Marble. He has worked at UTSI and held the Boling Chair of Excellence in Space Propulsion since 1991. Flandro has written or co-written 95 conference papers, including traveling to Kyoto, Japan in 2006 to present a paper titled “Understanding Oscillatory Behavior of Liquid Propellant Rockets and Jet Engine Thrust Augmentors," at the Seventh International Symposium on Special Topics in Chemical Propulsion. He has also written or co-authored 54 refereed papers, four books and two book chapters. He has been named a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics on May 13, 2008. Flandro is an 11th generation pupil of Euler. The lineage is:

Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

, Lagrange, Fourier, Lejeune Dirichlet, Lipschitz, Klein, Lindemann, Hilb, Bar, Liepmann, Marble, Flandro. Flandro’s work has supported decades of space flight and has led to successful missions to the outer planets. His research work with

combustion instability Combustion instabilities are physical phenomena occurring in a reacting flow (e.g., a flame) in which some perturbations, even very small ones, grow and then become large enough to alter the features of the flow in some particular way. In many pr ...

in solid rocket motors has “practically solved a challenging issue that had plagued the field for many years,” said

Vigor Yang Vigor or vigour may refer to: Companies * Vigor S.A., a Brazilian food company * Vigor Industrial, an American shipbuilding, ship repair, and industrial service provider in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska ** Vigor Shipyards, four shipyards in Wa ...

Head, School of Aerospace Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

. Flandro has coauthored several textbooks including: "Basic Aerodynamics: Incompressible Flow" with Howard McMahon and Robert L. Roach of Georgia Tech, and "Combustion Instability in Solid Propellant Rockets" with Edward W. Price of Georgia Tech. It is in regular use in Flandro's short courses at UTSI.

Gas giants

During the summer of 1964 at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL), Flandro was assigned the task of studying techniques for exploring the outer planets of the solar system. In this study he discovered the rare alignment of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) and conceived the

Planetary Grand Tour The Grand Tour was a NASA program that would have sent two groups of robotic probes to all the planets of the outer Solar System. It called for four spacecraft, two of which would visit Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto, while the other two would visit ...

multi-planet mission utilizing the gravity-assist technique to reduce the mission duration from forty years to less than ten years. This work was exploited by

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

with the

Voyager 1 ''Voyager 1'' is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. Launched 16 days after its twin ''Voyager 2'', ''Voya ...

and

Voyager 2 ''Voyager 2'' is a space probe launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, to study the outer planets and interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. As a part of the Voyager program, it was launched 16 days before its twin, ''Voyager 1'', on a ...

missions, launched in 1977. Flandro was recognized for this work first by the British Interplanetary Society (1970 M. N. Golovine Award), and later by NASA (1998 Exceptional Achievement Medal, with the citation: "for seminal contributions to the design and engineering of multi-outer-planet missions, including the Grand Tour opportunity for the epic Voyager explorations"). The ideas from this research have had major impact on subsequent solar system exploration; the

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...

(Jupiter satellite tour) mission and the Cassini (Saturn satellite tour) were made possible by the gravity assist method. Flandro (also in 1965) studied gravity assist trajectories to Pluto; these are the basis for the

New Horizons ''New Horizons'' is an Interplanetary spaceflight, interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research ...

mission launched in January 2006, which arrived at Pluto in 2015.

References

External links

Gary Flandro's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Flandro, Gary 21st-century American engineers University of Utah alumni University of Tennessee faculty 1934 births Living people People from Salt Lake City California Institute of Technology alumni