Memorial Tributes Volume 20 (2016) / Chapter Skim
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RICHARD H. BATTIN
RICHARD H. BATTIN
Pages 30-39
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From page 31... ...
He became assistant director of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory in 1951. Dick was a brilliant mathematician with an uncanny ability both to solve practical problems in an intuitive way and to explain complex procedures in simple, elegant terms.
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From page 32... ...
Draper became a legend in the aerospace industry based on his World War II fire control work and his subsequent leadership in inertial guidance. As a result of this reputation, government agencies frequently came to his laboratory (the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, now the Draper Laboratory)
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From page 33... ...
All algorithms for guidance, navigation, and, after 1964, flight control, as well as the code to implement these algorithms, were developed under his leadership. An amusing anecdote from early in the period is that when NASA called MIT asking how big their computer for the mission would be, Dick replied, "Well, we've got to give them a number; just tell them it's a cubic foot." And that is what it became.
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From page 34... ...
He did not do this in the abstract; what he did was in the context of a very real application -- another example of his practical insight. By linearizing the dynamics relative to the nominal nonlinear trajectory, Dick was able to propagate co ariance between measurement times using what is v now widely known as the state transition matrix to obtain a remarkably compact algorithm that had to be compatible with a very constraining computer architecture.
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From page 35... ...
Widespread use of common hardware (for example, a single type of logic circuit) and exhaustive hardware testing succeeded -- no Apollo guidance computer ever failed before, during, or after the Apollo missions.
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From page 36... ...
After the first lunar landing, some key members of the Apollo team left Draper's lab to form Intermetrics under the leadership of John Miller. This left some key positions open, including the head of flight control design and software for all the subsequent Apollo missions.
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From page 37... ...
I later became editor in chief and eventually moved on to become the founder of the Journal of Guidance and Control. The first editorial team consisted of experienced associate editors with relevant backgrounds from the other AIAA journals plus a few new people like Stephen Osder, who proved to be the "Lou Gehrig" of associate editors.
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From page 38... ...
It is a treasure trove of Battin's unique developments as well as numerous classical developments that he breathed new life into through his remarkable insights; these include his redevelopment of Gauss's hyper geometric functions and infinite fractions, and of Euler's "topdown method" for computing infinite fractions, and finally his use of these "special function" topics for important advances in astrodynamics computation. When the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics established in 1981 an award in "recognition of outstanding teaching," Dick was the first recipient.
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From page 39... ...
RICHARD H BATTIN 39 and Jeff and their wives, Daryl and Linda, a daughter, Pamela and her husband Steve Sacks, five grandchildren (Matthew, Beth, Rachel Sacks, Kelly, and Christopher)
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