When American-born pioneer of radio astronomy Grote Reber died in Tasmania in 2002, his ashes were separated into compact steel rectangular boxes and hand delivered to locations across the globe.<\/p>\n
The urn boxes were taken to major radio telescope observatories, universities and to four locations in Australia, including a cemetery in Bothwell, a rural town in middle Tasmania where Reber had lived.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One of many urn boxes that contain the ashes of Grote Reber. (ABC Hobart: Lucie Cutting)<\/p>\n
Reber is globally recognised for building the first “big dish” parabolic radio antenna, in his backyard in Illinois in 1937, which he used to make the first true radio map of the sky.<\/p>\n
In 1954 he moved to Tasmania where he spent more than half his life, living in Bothwell in central Tasmania and working in the state’s south.<\/p>\n
His collaborative research on radio emissions from space proved pivotal in igniting decades of interest in radio astronomy in Tasmania.<\/p>\n
His global legacy is scientific advancement, but locally he is remembered as a prominent Bothwell figure who drove an electric car named Pixie and lived with frugality always in mind.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grote Reber in his self-built electric car Pixie. (Supplied: Estate of Grote Reber)<\/p>\n
Move abroad<\/p>\n
In the 1950s, Reber said the area of Tasmania was one of two locations he could live to study radio astronomy, and a budding research partnership motivated him to choose the southern state.<\/p>\n
Radio astronomy uses radio telescopes to detect radio waves emitted by objects in space.<\/p>\n
Having a thinner ionosphere, the Earth’s upper atmosphere provides the best conditions for detecting emissions.<\/p>\n
Information collected from emissions can reveal major events of the universe, like the birth of stars and other new celestial objects.<\/p>\n
Reber identified Tasmania and the Great Lakes area of North America as two locations where radio waves could be captured because of a thinner ionosphere.<\/p>\n
“He realised not only is Tasmania a good place to go but he had a great contact \u2014 Graeme ‘Bill’ Ellis,” astronomer Martin George said.<\/p>\n
Dr George first met Reber in 1972 and later played a significant role in commemorating Reber’s legacy through the curation of the Grote Reber Museum in Tasmania and by distributing his ashes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grote Reber and Graeme ‘Bill’ Ellis in Tasmania in 1978. (Supplied: NSF\/AUI\/NSF NRAO\/Sullivan Collection)<\/p>\n
He said correspondence from Ellis, who worked at the Ionospheric Prediction Service and had shared information of existing equipment in Tasmania, motivated Reber to make the international move in 1954.<\/p>\n
Together they built a large antenna in southern Tasmania made of wires to detect radio waves from space.<\/p>\n
They successfully detected low frequency waves and produced a research paper.<\/p>\n
In the 1960s, when Ellis became a professor of physics at the University of Tasmania, Dr George believes Reber was an important “trigger” for the local scientist in his new role.<\/p>\n
“The university built a number of low frequency radio astronomy arrays in the Hobart area in the 60s and 70s,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n
“You could say that Reber’s arrival in Tasmania was the spark that caused so much interest in some wonderful initial two or three decades of low frequency radio astronomy in Tasmania.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grote Reber’s parabolic radio antenna was a precursor to “big dish” antennas across the globe. (ABC Hobart: Lucie Cutting)<\/p>\n
Thrifty approach to life<\/p>\n
In Bothwell, Reber was a prominent figure as an American researcher known for his “efficient and careful” use of money and love of “efficient transport”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grote Reber, pictured in 1975, favoured driving at 40 kilometres per hour. (Supplied: NRAO\/AUI\/NSF)<\/p>\n
His electric car Pixie was a sleek and streamlined vehicle designed to fit one person, but could also accommodate small children.<\/p>\n
“He would give the neighbourhood kids a ride in Pixie from time to time,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n
Alongside Pixie, Reber owned two petrol-powered cars that he would drive at 40 kilometres per hour on the winding roads surrounding Bothwell.<\/p>\n
To the dismay of other commuters, he believed driving his cars at 40kph was the most efficient speed for fuel conservation.<\/p>\n
“If you know the road between the Midland Highway and Bothwell \u2026 it’s quite twisty and turny,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n
“Locals would sometimes comment that it was really bad luck if they got stuck behind Grote on that road because they couldn’t pass.”<\/p>\n
Reber “analysed everything”, Dr George said, from how to best save 20 or 30 cents on postage to weighing apple cores to calculate how much money was lost on the inedible waste.<\/p>\n
He also used pencils at both ends and down to the nub.<\/p>\n
“He realised you could get a bit of extra use out of a pencil by sharpening the other end,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n
“He was always very interested in doing things in the most thrifty possible way.”<\/p>\n
Grote Reber’s pencils at the Grote Reber museum. (ABC News: Magie Khameneh)<\/p>\n
Delivering his ashes abroad<\/p>\n
A major project arose from Reber’s death, in December 2002, out of a desire to commemorate his life.<\/p>\n
No plan was in place for what to do with Reber’s ashes following his death.<\/p>\n
The radio astronomer had never married, had no children and “any relatives were very distant”, Dr George said.<\/p>\n
It was decided by those close to him to split his ashes into separate containers and transport the urn boxes to radio astronomy installations around the world.<\/p>\n
Over a period of one or two years, Dr George and radio astronomer David Jauncey delivered the urn boxes.<\/p>\n
At each location Dr George and Dr Jauncey would deliver a talk on Reber’s life achievements and occasionally speak with local media.<\/p>\n
“We went to places as diverse as Pushchino in Russia, Finland, the United States, England; many different places around the world,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n
“It was a great thing to do.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Grote Reber’s ashes at Jodrell Bank Observatory in England. (Wikimedia Commons<\/a>: Mike Peel<\/a>, CC-BY-SA-4.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n Shed of significance<\/p>\n At Mt Pleasant Radio Observatory south of Hobart is the Grote Reber Museum, a bricks and mortar commemoration to the radio astronomer.<\/p>\n After Reber’s death, his belongings were sent to Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston for cataloguing and Dr George selected some items for display.<\/p>\n The museum is a curation of Reber’s private and public passions that speak to his ingenuity and thrift.<\/p>\n Grote Reber, pictured in 1995, is considered the “father of radio astronomy”. (Supplied: Martin George)<\/p>\n At the back of the museum, Pixie sits in what appears to be a cross-section of an old wooden shed.<\/p>\n “It is the shed that used to be in the middle of Grote’s array of wires in Bothwell,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n “To put it simply, the wires picked up the radio emissions from space and basically channelled them into his receiving hut in the middle [of the array].”<\/p>\n Reber’s radio array of wires, which captured really low frequency radio waves, was a major achievement of his in Tasmania.<\/p>\n He used it to make the first radio map of the southern sky at a 2.085 Megahertz.<\/p>\n Because the hut had been moved from its original location, it was overlooked in the sale of his home but identified on a later visit by Dr George and purchased from the new owner.<\/p>\n “This shed is an amazing piece of astronomical history \u2026 [it] is very, very significant,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n Pixie parked in Grote Reber’s shed at the museum. (ABC Hobart: Lucie Cutting)<\/p>\n Place in history<\/p>\n Dr George does not compare Reber directly to Italian astronomer Galileo, but said the principle was the same.<\/p>\n “He was the one who started it off [radio astronomy], he really did,” Dr George said.<\/p>\n “Galileo was the first to seriously use the telescope for astronomical purposes; Grote was the first to use a radio receiver for astronomical purposes.”<\/p>\n When delivering lectures at universities, Dr George includes Reber when talking about the history of astronomy.<\/p>\n “As these students get older \u2026 they will no doubt get to a point where they think, ‘Oh gosh, that Grote Reber guy, he started all this off and wasn’t it wonderful to do that in 1937,'” Dr George said.<\/p>\n “I think they would think back like that and I think it’s important to as well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When American-born pioneer of radio astronomy Grote Reber died in Tasmania in 2002, his ashes were separated into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[4645,21017,21020,21016,111,139,69,21018,21015,21019,147,392,3929],"class_list":["post-19864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-astronomy","tag-big-dish","tag-electric-car","tag-grote-reber","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pioneering-astronomer","tag-radio-astronomer","tag-radio-map-of-the-sky","tag-science","tag-space","tag-telescope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Man](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:At_Jodrell_Bank_Observatory_2024_003.jpg\")