Von R. Eshleman

Von Russel Eshleman (1924–2017) was an American radio astronomer.

Biography Eshleman was born on September 17, 1924, in Covington, Ohio. His family was of Old German Baptist Brethren ancestry; he was the youngest of four sons. During the war, Eshleman served in the US Navy as an electronics technician (1943–1946). While in the Navy, he became interested in astronomy, thinking about "bouncing radio signals from the lunar surface". He unsuccessfully tried to do it using the ship's radar.

After the war, Eshleman studied at the General Motors Institute of Technology, Ohio State University and the George Washington University. He received his BSc in electrical engineering from the latter in 1949. He get his MSc (1950) and PhD (1952) from Stanford University. His thesis was on "radio reflections from ionized meteor trails in the upper Earth's atmosphere", advised by Oswald Garrison Villard Jr. and Laurence Albert Manning.

He then switched to planetary exploration using radio science experiments. Eshleman became the PI of Radio Science Experiment for the twin Voyager program spacecraft, sent to the outer solar system. After Voyager, Eshleman worked on "evolute flashes during deep radio occultations, stellar gravitational lenses and their effects on propagating radio waves, ring particle dynamics, absorption in planetary atmospheres ... and retro-reflection from icy planetary surfaces."

Eshleman authored more than a hundred articles.

Selected publications