Born Novocherkassk, Russia, 13 January 1889
Died Moscow, (Russia), 12 March 1972
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Vasilii Fesenkov, a astrophysicist of the older generation, was the leading planetologist and scholar in meteoritics of the pre-spaceflight era, one of only a few academicians (Soviet Academy of Sciences) in the field of astronomy (from 1935), and an outstanding and enthusiastic promoter of Soviet astronomy.
Fesenkov was a 1911 graduate of Kharkov University. (After the disintegration of the USSR, it came into the possession of the Republic of the Ukraine.) One of his teachers was Gustav Struve . In 1912–1914, he received internships at the Paris, Meudon, and Nice observatories. Twenty-eight years old at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, soon thereafter Fesenkov organized in Moscow the first State Astrophysical Institute (1923), which he headed until its reorganization (en massewith two other bodies) into the Shternberg State Astronomical Institute [GAISh]. During the...
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Selected References
Divari, N. B. (1989). “Vasilii Grigorevich Fesenkov - A Prominent Astrophysicist (For the Centennial of his Birth)” (in Russian). Istorico-Astronomicheskie Issledovaniya (Research in the history of astronomy) 21: 302-326.
Fesenkov, V. G. (1944). Cosmogony of the Solar System (in Russian). Moscow: Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
— (1947). Meteoric Matter in Interplanetary Space (in Russian). Moscow-Leningrad: Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
— (1965). Meteoric Matter in Interplanetary Space. NASA Technical Translation F-378. Washington, DC: NASA.
Fesenkov, V. G. et al. (1958). The Zodiacal Twilight (the Atmospheric Component of the Zodiacal Light): Six Russian Papers, translated by Earl R. Hope. Ottawa: Directorate of Scientific Information Service, DRB Canada.
Gurshtein, A. A. and I. N. Minin (1999). “Physics of the Solar System” (in Russian). In History of Astronomy in Russia and the USSR, pp. 133-166. Moscow: Yanus-K.
Oparin, A. I. and V. G. Fesenkov (1961). Life in the Universe, foreword by Harlow Shapley. Translated from the Russian by David A. Myshne. New York: Twayne.
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Gurshtein, A.A. (2014). Fesenkov, Vasilii Grigorevich. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_451
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