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Brian Geoffrey Marsden (1937 - 2010)
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Brian Geoffrey Marsden (5 August 1937 Cambridge, England - 18 November 2010 Burlington, Massachusetts, US) was a British astronomer born in Cambridge, England, and educated at The Perse School in Cambridge, New College, Oxford and Yale University. Dr. Marsden was the longtime director of the Minor Planet Centre (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (director emeritus from 2006 to 2010).
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RE: Brian Marsden (1937 - 2010)
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Brian Marsden, who died on November 18 aged 73, was a leading tracker of comets and asteroids and was once described as a "cheery herald of fear", after he predicted in 1998 that there was a chance that in 2028 an asteroid could crash into Earth, wreaking devastation.



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Brian Marsden, Eminent Astronomer and Comet/Asteroid Tracker, Dies

Dr. Brian Geoffrey Marsden passed away today at the age of 73 following a prolonged illness. He was a Supervisory Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Director Emeritus of the Minor Planet Centre.
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Brian Marsden (1937 Aug. 5 - 2010 Nov. 18)

Brian Geoffrey Marsden was born on 1937 August 5 in Cambridge, England. His father, Thomas, was the senior mathematics teacher at a local high school.  It was his mother, Eileen (nee West), however, who introduced him to the study of astronomy, when he returned home on the Thursday during his first week in primary school in 1942 and found her sitting in the back yard watching an eclipse of the sun.  Using now frowned-upon candle-smoked glass, they sat watching the changing bite out of the sun.  What most impressed the budding astronomer, however, was not that the eclipse could be seen, but the fact that it had been predicted in advance, and it was the idea that one could make successful predictions of events in the sky that eventually led him to his career.
MPEC 2010 - W10

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