Nelson, Jerry Earl

Jerry Earl Nelson, (born January 15, 1944, Glendale, California, U.S.—died June 10, 2017, Santa Cruz, California), American telescope designer and astronomer who originated the assembly of large telescope mirrors out of smaller segments.

Nelson received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1965 and a doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1972. He subsequently joined the physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 1977 Nelson was a member of a University of California committee that designed a 10-metre (400-inch) telescope that would supplant the 5-metre (200-inch) Hale Telescope. A single mirror of such a size would sag under its own weight and would have cost one billion dollars. Nelson came up with the simpler solution of constructing the mirror out of smaller segments. From 1977 to 1979 Nelson and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory worked on the challenges of assembling such a large mirror, which included designing a system of sensors and actuators that allow the individual segments to work in concert as a single optical surface and devising a way to polish the individual mirror segments into an asymmetrical surface. Nelson’s design was chosen for the two telescopes that later made up the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Nelson became project scientist at Keck.