James B. Pollack, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetJames B. Pollack
American astronomer
Date of Birth: 09-Jul-1938
Place of Birth: New York City, New York, United States
Date of Death: 13-Jun-1994
Profession: astronomer
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Cancer 
About James B. Pollack
- James Barney Pollack (July 9, 1938 – June 13, 1994) was an American astrophysicist who worked for NASA's Ames Research Center. Pollack was born on July 9, 1938, and was brought up in Woodmere, Long Island by a Jewish family that was in the women's garment business.
- He was a valedictorian of his class at Lawrence High School and graduated from Princeton University in 1960.
- He then received his master's in nuclear physics at University of California, Berkeley in 1962 and his Ph.D from Harvard in 1965, where he was a student of Carl Sagan.
- He was openly gay.
- Dorion Sagan told how his father came to the defense of Pollack's lover in a problem with obtaining treatment at the university health service emergency department.Pollack specialized in atmospheric science, especially the atmospheres of Mars and Venus.
- He investigated the possibility of terraforming Mars, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the possibility of nuclear winter since the 1980s with Christopher McKay and Sagan.
- The work of Pollack et al.
- (1996) on the formation of giant planets ("core accretion paradigm") is seen today as the standard model.He explored the weather on Mars using data from the Mariner 9 spacecraft and the Viking mission.
- On this he based ground-breaking computer simulations of winds, storms, and the general climate on that planet.
- An overview of Pollack's scientific vita is given in the memorial talk "James B.
- Pollack: A Pioneer in Stardust to Planetesimals Research" held at an Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1996 symposium. He was a recipient of the Gerard P.
- Kuiper Prize in 1989 for outstanding lifetime achievement in the field of planetary science.
- Pollack died in 1994 from a rare form of spinal cancer, at age 55. A crater on Mars was named in his honor.
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