Table Of ContentSpringer Biographies
My Life in Space
Exploration
GERHARD HAERENDEL
Springer Biographies
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Gerhard Haerendel
My Life in Space
Exploration
Gerhard Haerendel
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial
Physics (Emeritus)
Garching, Germany
ISSN 2365-0613 ISSN 2365-0621 (electronic)
Springer Biographies
ISBN 978-3-031-10285-1 ISBN 978-3-031-10286-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10286-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland
AG 2022
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Front cover: The author at home in January 2022
Back cover: The author and Werner Lieb on Kitt Peak, September 1971
The second artificial comet on 18 July 1985 in false colors
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Die Linien des Lebens sind Verschieden
Wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Gränzen.
Was Hir wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen
Mit Harmonien und ewigem Lohn und Frieden.1
(Friedrich Hölderlin 1823)
1 The lines of life are various
Like roads, and the borders of mountains.
What we are here, a God can complete there,
With harmonies, eternal reward, and peace.
Dedicated to the memory of my mentor, Reimar Lüst (1923–2020),
and
to Dina, in gratitude for her lifetime of loving care
and
understanding of the scientist.
Preface
The stimulus for the following account was the typical remark, “You really
must write that down,” when, at dinners with friends or on other social
occasions, it fell upon me to tell the story of our barium cloud experiments.
My equally typical response was, “You’re right, but I don’t feel any writerly
urge in me.” Even when I had formally retired, this reluctance remained. It
was more important for me to engage in research as far as possible. When
I was a visiting professor at Dartmouth College in 2011, a German literary
scholar, fascinated by my stories, even offered to write the book for me, since
I couldn’t face doing it myself. I couldn’t warm up to that either. It took a few
more years of timid attempts to set things down on paper before a foot opera-
tion finally grounded me, and I began in earnest to write down my memories
with my laptop on my thighs. I had by now passed eighty and felt pressed by
a growing historical responsibility not to let the story of this quarter-century-
long experiment drift into oblivion. Out of this came Chap. 2 of the present
account.
Naturally, I had not mutated into a writer meanwhile. But it was clear
that what I had presented in about eighty pages was unfinished. It clamored
to be embedded in the before and after. And so this professional autobiog-
raphy came into being. In the meantime, I had recognized something else,
namely that it was not enough to record only the events, the experiences, and
the decisions. The motivation for the projects also had to be made clear. In
this way, short, condensed descriptions of their physical background flowed
into the corresponding narrative. Fortunately, some things are rather easy
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x Preface
to communicate, and indeed almost all the subjects of my research have in
common that they manifest themselves in visible phenomena. On the other
hand, the physics behind them, though it is just classical electrodynamics and
Newtonian mechanics, is less simple. I have done what I can to convey it by
pictures and scientific sketches (cartoons). Still, I may be giving some readers
a bit of a hard time on some topics. There is undoubtedly a whiff of “Scien-
tific American” or “Spectrum of Science” in this autobiography. On the plus
side, however, it provides a certain insight into the less familiar interactions of
magnetic fields and ionized matter that govern events, not only in near-Earth
space, but throughout the space between the stars and often in the stars them-
selves. I limit myself, of course, to topics that I have had the opportunity to
work on over the past six decades, but which represent only one strand in the
vast web of space research. Special emphasis has been given to the physical
background of the aurora borealis, which is always presented in the media
and museums in a disappointingly simplified, and in fact inaccurate manner.
However deeply the reader may peer into my representations, he/she should
get a feel for what has driven me and what has moved me spiritually.
Garching, Germany Gerhard Haerendel
Acknowledgments
The fact that, what was planned just as an account of my professional life,
has now assumed the shape of a commercially available book is owed to
the encouragement of two persons. The first was my daughter, Dr. Ulrike
Haerendel, a historian, who lowered my doubts to the extent that I dared
sending the manuscript to Prof. Jürgen Renn, Director of the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science. His immediate encouragement was deci-
sive and the more so as he brought his colleague, Dr. Luisa Bonolis, into the
team advising me how to proceed toward publication. To both of them, I
want to express my deep gratitude. Letting advice follow by action, Luisa
addressed Dr. Angela Lahee from Springer Nature with sending her my
manuscript. Her interest having been aroused, she has advised me patiently
through all the steps toward publication as a Springer Biography. The first
step was the translation of the German manuscript into English language by
the DeepL auto-translation. After my critical checking the surprisingly well-
translated text, Angela won a native English speaker, freelance editor, Stephen
N. Lyle, for further polishing the text. I am most thankful to Angela and
Stephen for their very constructive assistance. Finally, special thanks go to
Ashok Arumairaj of Springer Nature for the excellent production work.
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