Nationality United States Fields Astrophysics | Name James Houck Institutions Cornell University Doctoral students Judith Pipher | |
Born October 5, 1940
Mobile, Alabama ( 1940-10-05 ) Alma mater Carnegie-Mellon University, Cornell University Known for Key contributions to the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and Spitzer Space Telescope missions Notable awards NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1984 and 2005), Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation (2008) Died September 18, 2015, Ithaca, New York, United States Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada | ||
Education Cornell University (1967) | ||
James Richard Houck (October 5, 1940 – September 18, 2015) was the Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University.
Houck pioneered infrared observational astronomy, designing detectors and spectrographs that were flown on sounding rockets in the 1960s, on airborne observatories in the 1970s, and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in 1984 and the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2003. He also led development of Cornell's instrumentation for the Palomar Observatory Hale Telescope.
Houck's research outside instrumentation has focused on the mechanisms responsible for energy generation in Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs), of which he was a discoverer using the IRAS satellite. Houck has also studied the formation of dust in the early Universe.
He was married to Elaine Vezzani, with whom he had two children, until her death in 2011.