Dr. Edward “Ted” Bowell (Emeritus)

Planetary Science

D. ès Sci Université de Paris 6, 1973

Dr. Ted Bowell directed the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search (LONEOS), which used a fully automated 59-cm Schmidt telescope at Anderson Mesa to observe large areas of sky each month. In nine years of operation, LONEOS discovered about 300 near-Earth asteroids and 44 comets and produced more than 4 million astrometric positions of asteroids and comets.

With colleagues, he has published extensively on orbit computation, with a particular interest in the ephemeris uncertainties resulting from noise in astrometric observations. Applications include the identification of asteroids and methods of searching for trans-Neptunian objects and lost asteroids. He maintained a web-accessible file of asteroid orbits (currently, more than 377,000) and related URLs for asteroid ephemeris computation. Bowell’s previous research centered on the photographic discovery of asteroids and comets, and the optical polarimetric and light-scattering properties of the surfaces of the Moon, planets, and asteroids.