Von Russel Eshleman (1924âÂÂ2017) was an American radio astronomer.
Eshleman was born on September 17, 1924, in Covington, Ohio. His family was of Old German Baptist Brethren ancestry; he was the youngest of four sons. During the war, Eshleman served in the US Navy as an electronics technician (1943âÂÂ1946). While in the Navy, he became interested in astronomy, thinking about "bouncing radio signals from the lunar surface". He unsuccessfully tried to do it using the ship's radar.
After the war, Eshleman studied at the General Motors Institute of Technology, Ohio State University and the George Washington University. He received his BSc in electrical engineering from the latter in 1949. He get his MSc (1950) and PhD (1952) from Stanford University. His thesis was on "radio reflections from ionized meteor trails in the upper Earth's atmosphere", advised by Oswald Garrison Villard Jr. and Laurence Albert Manning. Eshleman was supported by both Office of Naval Research and Air Force. The Air Force was mainly interested in Eshleman's idea to use meteor ionization trails as a secure communication channel. He then became a researcher at Stanford, promoted to assistant professor in 1957 and to full professor in 1962. In the same year, he cofounded the Stanford Center for Radar Astronomy which performed radio science experiments with Pioneer 6, 7, 8, and 9 spacecraft. In 1959, Eshleman "recorded the first distinguishable echo of a radar signal bounced off the sun".
He then switched to planetary exploration using radio science experiments. Eshleman became the PI of Radio Science Experiment for the twin Voyager program spacecraft, sent to the outer solar system. After Voyager, Eshleman worked on "evolute flashes during deep radio occultations, stellar gravitational lenses and their effects on propagating radio waves, ring particle dynamics, absorption in planetary atmospheres ... and retro-reflection from icy planetary surfaces."
In 1979, Eshleman became the first who propose to use the Sun as a gravitational lens.
Eshleman authored more than a hundred articles.
Eshleman met his future wife, Patricia Middleton, in Stanford. They married in 1947 and had four children.
Eshleman retired in 1992. He died on September 22, 2017, in Palo Alto, California, at 93.