Albert Greve (Photo courtesy of the Greve family)
Albert Greve
Contributed by Jeff Mangum based on material provided by Dennis Downes,
Pierre Cox, Michel Guelin, and Albert's daughter, Sophie.
Albert Greve was born on 30 December 1938 in Hamburg-Harburg
Germany. Originally a German citizen, Albert obtained his Dutch
citizenship in 1998. From April 1955 to Sept 1956 Albert worked as an
apprentice in an optical components factory. He did his "abitur"
(final school exams in Germany) via night school in Hamburg in 1959.
He studied astronomy at Leiden University Faculty of Mathematics and
Natural Sciences, Leiden, The Netherlands starting in 1960. Albert
received his bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1964 and his master's
degree in astronomy and physics in 1967. From 1967 to 1968 Albert
worked for the Cosmic Radiance group at Leiden University. From 1969
to 1970 Albert worked for the UKAE Laboratory in Culham having
received a scholarship from ESRO. From May 1970 until June 1971
Albert worked for the department of astronomical instruments at
Carl-Zeiss. From 1971 through 1978 Albert worked for the technical
department of the Max-Planck-Institute für Radioastronomie in Bonn,
Germany. On September 13, 1978 Albert earned his PhD in astronomy
from Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. His thesis was
entitled "High Resolution UV Observations and the Formation of the
Solar Mg II Resonance Lines".
The IRAM Observatories:
It was largely thanks to the early site work done by Albert that two
IRAM observatories, the interferometer on the Plateau de Bure in
France, and the 30-meter telescope at Pico Veleta in Spain, were
built at the places where they are now. In 1973, the possible partners of the future millimeter
project, that became IRAM, had proposed to measure the water vapor
content on three possible sites. The French group at Meudon was
tasked with testing the Plateau de Padrille in the Pyrenees, the
British group at the Appleton Laboratory was given the task of testing
the site of Montbel in the Massif Central, and the German group at the
Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie at Bonn was tasked with
testing the site of Plateau de Bure in the Hautes-Alpes, a site that
had already been considered by the Meudon group. Albert Greve was in
charge of the German group.
During 1974, Albert made measurements on the Plateau de Bure with the
telescope operators who were then working at the 100-m Effelsberg
telescope, near Bonn, all living under difficult conditions in a
pre-fabricated container building set up on the Plateau for these
tests. His group regularly took weather data, using, among other
instruments, infrared hygrometers that Albert himself had developed,
in order to measure the amount of precipitable water vapour in the
atmosphere. It was in part thanks to these measurements that the
Plateau de Bure was finally chosen as the site for the IRAM
Interferometer.
In 1975, shortly after the tests of Plateau de Bure, Albert was sent
to southern Spain, to study another possible site, at Pico Veleta, in
the Sierra Nevada, near Granada. This time he used data from balloon
instruments deployed each day by the meterological services, as well
as his own infrared hygrometers. In parallel, he made the first
inquiries into the logistical possibilities for a observatory station
headquarters located in Granada. Thus also in this case, it is partly
due to the efforts of Albert, 36 years ago, that today we have the
IRAM observatory on Pico Veleta.
In the 1980s, Albert joined the IRAM staff, and continued his services
in making, for each newly-constructed IRAM antenna, the initial
theodolite measurements of the surface alignment. He started this work
on the 30-m telescope in Spain, and continued this type of measurement
on the first five of the six antennas on Plateau de Bure.
Thanks to his good knowledge of the observatory in Spain, Albert was
named station manager at Granada during the period 1990 through 1992.
In this period, and during the following years, he became an expert in
the field of the thermal behavior of antenna structures, which is a
crucial problem for radio observations at millimeter and sub-mm
wavelengths. Thanks to this expertise, Albert was highly in demand to
serve as advisor on the design of other millimeter telescopes in the
world, and in particular, for the antennas of the Atacama Large
Millimeter Array (ALMA), that started its first astronomical
observations at the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile in 2009.
Scientifically, Albert was initially trained as an optical astronomer,
and during his career, he observed at many optical telescopes in the
world, taking spectra of nearby galaxies. Albert published over 175
scientific papers in his career, the most recent published just one
month before his passing, in addition to his world-renouned work on
the characterization of radio telescope systems. With the IRAM radio
telescopes, Albert made an important contribution as local organizer
of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations.
After his retirement in 2003, Albert continued working as a consultant
for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) for the ALMA project, and
continued to write astronomical papers. He even wrote a book, with
Michael Bremer, Thermal Design and Thermal Behaviour of Radio
Telescopes and Their Enclosures, which is a fundamental reference for
the construction of high-precision radio telescopes.
Albert was also well-known for his wit. There are many stories that
one can tell which describe Albert's wonderful sense of humor. A good
example occurred in 1993 when the author first met Albert while we
were both working on the construction of the Submillimeter Telescope
(SMT) in Arizona. Albert's expertise in antenna surface measurement
was being utilized to set the surface of the SMT. The SMT is located
on Mount Graham in southwest Arizona about two hours away from the city of
Tucson, where the management offices of this facility are located.
During one of these two hour drives from Tucson to Mount Graham the
author was telling Albert how excited I was to be traveling to Germany
in the coming month, as I had not traveled outside of the US before.
I was going to fly into Frankfurt, and I told Albert that I really
hoped that I would hear someone say "Ich bin ein Frankfurter" (which,
as you know, translates literally into "I am a hotdog" in English).
Without even a moment's hesitation Albert responded "Ich bin ein
Hamburger!" (after which he explained that he grew-up near Hamburg).
I think that we both laughed for a good 5 minutes after that.
Albert died on 13 June 2011. He was a great scientist, and an even better person. He will be
missed by everyone who had the fortune of knowing him.