About Fred Lawrence Whipple
Fred Lawrence Whipple was an American astronomer, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory for more than 70 years. Among his achievements were asteroid and comet discoveries, the "dirty snowball" hypothesis of comets, and the invention of the Whipple shield. In 1933, Whipple discovered the periodic comet 36P/Whipple and the asteroid 1252 Celestia, which he named after his mother. His first published result was the calculation of the 29P/Schwassmann–Wachmann orbit. In 1930, he helped to map the orbit of the then newly discovered planet Pluto. When Whipple read an article by Ernst Öpik on comets and meteors he became interested in determining meteor trajectories.
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