Marjorie Meinel

MARJORIE PETTIT MEINEL Marjorie Meinel was born in Pasadena, Calif., May 13, 1922, and died at age 86, June 24, 2008, peaceably from natural causes in Henderson. She was the beloved wife, of Aden Meinel for 64 years. She bore seven children, all living, Carolyn, Walter, Barbara, Elaine, Edward, Mary and David. Her parents were Drs. Edison Pettit and Hannah Bard Steele Pettit, both astronomers. Marjorie assisted her father in making the first time-lapse movies of eruptive solar prominences using their backyard six-inch telescope. She obtained her BA at Pomona College (1943) and MA in astronomy at Claremont Colleges (1944). As a teaching assistant she taught Army airmen navigation using a traditional sextant. Several of her students became navigators on Jimmy Doolittle's famous air raid on Tokyo in 1942. She immediately started work at California Institute of Technology as Associate Editor of World War II secret rocket programs marrying co-researcher Aden Meinel in 1944. She suspended professional work until her seven children completed their schooling whereupon she resumed work at the University of Arizona, Tucson, with her husband on applications of solar energy. She was appointed member, Arizona Solar Energy Commission, 1976, and member, Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, 1978, Solar Energy Panel. She was selected in 1980 as one of the five outstanding "Women in Physics" by the American Physical Society. When she and her husband retired from the University of Arizona, they continued as a research team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, one task being to decide how to fix the Hubble Space Telescope's flawed primary mirror at its subsequent repair mission. She received numerous national and international awards, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, 1993, the Kingslake Medal of the Optical Society of America in 1993 and an unusual second awarding, in 2000, and shared with her husband the 1997 Gold Medal of the International Optical Engineering Society. The Optical Science Center at the University was dedicated as the Meinel Building. She was co-author of books with Aden including "Applied Solar Energy," and subsequently "Sunsets, Twilights and Evening Skies," both by Cambridge U. Press. They retired to Santa Barbara and subsequently moved to Henderson. A memorial service will be celebrated at 4 p.m. Sunday, June 29, at Christ the Servant Lutheran Church, 2 S. Pecos Road, Henderson. Donations may be made to the Memorial Fund of Christ the Servant.