Donald Alfred Gurnett (April 11, 1940 – January 13, 2022) was an American physicist and professor at the University of Iowa who specialized in plasma physics.[1][2]
Early life and education
Gurnett grew up in Fairfax, Iowa. In his spare time he built and flew model airplanes with a club at the airport in Cedar Rapids. There he met the German expatriate scientist Alexander Lippisch.[1]
Gurnett received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Iowa in 1962, and then his master's degree in physics in 1963 and his doctorate in 1965.[1]
Career
Gurnett's research into space plasmas (and his involvement in the development of electronics and measuring devices for space missions) began while he was a student and eventually led to early studies of plasma waves in the Earth's radiation belt (via low-frequency radio waves).[3] From 1962, he was a NASA trainee at the University of Iowa and Stanford University (1964/65). He participated to the Injun satellites program designed and built by researchers at the University of Iowa to observe various radiation and magnetic phenomena in the ionosphere and beyond.[4] In 1965, he became an assistant professor, in 1968 an associate professor, and in 1972 a professor at the University of Iowa.[1]
His involvement with space plasmas continued through his involvement in 41 NASA missions, including Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to the outer planets,[5][6][7] the Galileo mission to Jupiter, and the Cassini mission to Saturn.[8] He was particularly concerned with the formation of the plasma waves observable in the radio spectrum in the plasmas of the radiation belts of planets with magnetic fields and wave-particle interactions in the plasmas, which are often easier to study in space than in the laboratory.[1]
