Victor Galindo Ph.D.

National Aviation and Space Exploration Wall of Honor
Honoree: Victor Galindo, Ph.D. (4pgs, c. 2000)
Photo: Victor and Adele Galindo, 1974, Glendale, CA (while working at JPL)

Inventor, analyst, author, and activist: From the pioneering spacecrafts of the late 60's to satellite communications today, my father is recognized by the scientific community as a world leader in his field. The innovations and creativity of Dr. Victor Galindo continue to dramatically enhance our ability to acquire knowledge of our world and our universe.

My dad got his start in the US Navy as a top electronics technician on the aircraft carriers USS Boxer CV21 and USS Valley Forge CV45. He used to tell my mom, Adele, that they always won the maneuvers when he took care of the radar. After I was born, my dad went to UC Berkeley, California. A fellow student at the time and long time friend, Dr. Stu Rudin, remembers,

"Vic was the only person I have ever met, in college or Grad School, who took Math and Engineering exams including Mid-terms and Finals with a fountain pen! [however] what I remember most about your dad is how brilliant he was."

36 years later (c.2000), Professor Jack Welch, Ph.D., Director of the Radio Astronomy Lab at UC Berkeley (who was awarded the Berkeley Citation) immediately remembered my father's unique work. He said,

"His thesis was exceptional, very imaginative. His work has had an enormous influence in the electronics industry. In engineering, one often just analyzes how a device might work. Dr. Galindo's special talent is his inventiveness, and it is a rare talent."

In 2006, an honorarium for Dr. Welch at his retirement (Almost 50 Years at HCRO: One Decade is Never Enough) said the following about my father:

"Jack's first EE graduate student, Victor Galindo, earned his PhD in 1964. His thesis, "Synthesis of Dual Reflector Antennas" described the design of shaped reflector surfaces for efficient operation. Victor's work is still used by dish designers today. Jack was clearly off to a good start."
(SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2006ASPC..356...87F)

The Dish Antenna - What Dr. Welch refers to in particular is that Vic Galindo invented a dual shaped reflector antenna for his Doctoral Thesis in 1964. My father's friend and colleague, Dr. David Rochblatt, who worked with my father at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California, explained the vast impact of this invention.

"The specially shaped antenna enhanced our ability to receive and transmit scientific data so significantly that it pioneered a variety of uses which has saved government and our industrial infrastructure literally billions of dollars over the years. It enabled exponentially faster, clearer high frequency signal transmission and reception for air, sea, land and space vehicles and structures. NASA and other satellite contractors almost immediately adopted Vic's invention. "

In aerospace technology, this meant that a much greater amount of data could be transmitted/received through the brief window of spacecraft communication than ever before. Importantly, space craft no longer needed to carry heavy storage components to hold the data gathered on their missions because they could send the data quickly and accurately to Earth. The opportunity to add more scientific instruments and the ability to send Earth a significantly greater amount of clear data from these instruments, in record time, was a landmark in communications and engineering.

The Red Spot - Imagine the cost savings of decreasing the weight of the spacecraft in an $865 million dollar launch program - kind of like the difference between launching a baseball and a bowling ball. The two Voyager crafts weighed less than 1800 lbs each and carried 11 scientific instruments weighing 249lbs. The big dish shaped antennas were 12 ft. in diameter. In the late 70's my father's invention contributed to our ability to receive color pictures of the planets from the Voyager and other spacecrafts. Jupiter's famous red spot was photographed at a distance of 30 million miles from the planets' surface.

We are still discovering volcanoes, lightning, grand canyons, dozens of new moons and colorful rings around distant planets. The capability to explore the time domain (changes in the complex dynamics of planetary atmosphere) was enhanced by the increased speed and accuracy of the antenna transmission and reception.

Beyond the Heliosphere - The Voyager crafts have traveled approximately eight billion miles into space and we still receive clear data on Earth today (July 2000) from my fathers' original antenna design. Deep Space Network ground system primary antennas, and DSN antennas on modern craft are my fathers' dual shaped design. By 2005, the Voyagers should penetrate the outermost realm of our solar system, the suns' heliosphere - an event that physicists eagerly await. Upon exiting the heliosphere they will provide our first glimpse of INTERSTELLAR SPACE. What a legacy! (2016 update: The entire Mission is discussed on the NASA/JPL website here: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/index.html )

The first design itself - Prior to the use of this antenna, parabolic or hyperbolic reflectors were used to transmit and receive data. These antennas were designed using simple geometrical surfaces. Because electromagnetic waves illuminate the antenna aperture with a uniform wave front, these antennas had difficulty achieving efficient signal reception or transmission. My dad's invention of a dual shaped surface using xyz algebraic coordinates instead of simple geometric coordinates provided a means for dramatically improving performance. His continued analytical innovations are still the leading edge today.

The first Video Phone - In the early 70's my dad also invented a means for a telephone to be hooked up to an individual television set and send/receive a picture of the user at each end of the line, i.e. a video phone that could be used in every household. The company he worked for wanted to sell a separate unit for the video screen instead of using the TV connection. That unit had such a poor, tiny, snowy picture that it never sold and the original videophone technology never was brought to the public.

Activist - My dad's working papers appeared in hundreds the IEEE newsletters and other publications from 1964 to date. In the early history of IEEE, my dad thought the organization should be more involved in looking after the welfare of its members and was relentless in pursuing this spirited mission. According to his long-time colleague, Dr. Noach Amitay,

"Despite the objection of the IEEE Board of Directors, which thought that the sole purpose of the IEEE was to disseminate technical information, [your] father obtained enough signatures to put this to a vote and [soon] an amendment was successfully adopted and incorporated into the IEEE bylaws. New committees were organized which now track employment, salaries, pensions and other important parameters which are vital to the careers of IEEE members."

The IEEE Fort Worth Section Newsletter, SIGNALS September 1998 states the following in its "Origins of IEEE-USA". Also, in honor of IEEE-USA's Silver Jubilee, long-time volunteer John Guarrera delivered these remarks at the IEEE-USA 25th anniversary dinner that took place during the recent Board Series Meetings in Detroit:

(1970) "Vic Galindo, an active member of the Microwave Theories and Techniques Society, successfully circulated a petition to change the constitution, which would have converted the IEEE to an organization that would have as its primary interest the economic welfare of its members. The IEEE Board did not feel that this was in the best interests of the IEEE and vigorously and publicly opposed the petition. This was a very unpopular Board position at that time due to the unemployment problems and the loss of pension benefits being experienced by our members.

Vic Galindo's petition succeeded in getting a majority vote, but not the two thirds required for passage. The Board got the message and proposed an alternative constitutional amendment to "permit" the IEEE to become involved in the economic welfare of the membership. This was supported by the IEEE Board and the local leadership of the Institute and passed with an all-time record of 82% of the votes cast in favor, and an all-time record of voter turnout.

A somewhat hectic and disorganized USAC, later USAB, with a very limited budget, started working on all the problems at once! We received input from all of the local leaders and activists and co-opted just about everything. We immediately established committees on age discrimination, pensions, a legal defense fund, patent rights of the employed engineer, and outreach to inform members of USAB and its activities......"

I should note that Mr. Guarrera spoke out against the "Galindo petition" at UCLA at the time, according to his Oral History [John Guarrera, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1995 by Frederik Nebeker, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.]. It is significant that he and the IEEE specifically and publicly recognized the positive, broad and lasting impact of my father's efforts 25 years later.

Deep Space Network Antenna arrays - If you look for references on Large Periodic Arrays, this book is one of the first listed: "Theory and Analysis of Phased Array Antennas", published by Wiley-Interscience, a division of John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (1972), copyright Bell Telephone Labs, Inc. and Victor Galindo. Co-authors were Noach Amitay and Chen Pang Wu, who have been friends of my father for three decades. My sister, Maria, and I used to play with Dr. Amitay's daughters Elisa and Tamar (Rena was a baby and there is also Sarah), and we lived right across the street from Dr. CP Wu and his daughters, Natalie, Noreen and Nerissa. Dr. Amitay says:

"Our research involved the electromagnetic analysis, design and implementation of the phased array part of the system. The book presents the scientific approach and analysis of certain classes of phased arrays which are suitable for the intended deployment [at the time, only the military could afford to develop phased arrays]."

Phased array antennas make up the worldwide Deep Space Network (DSN) used today by astrophysicists and scientists worldwide. These ground systems are used to track trajectories, electronically combining to strengthen signal reception and transmission. For example, the Voyager signal, produced by a 20 watt radio transmitter, is so faint that the amount of power reaching our antennas is 20 billion times smaller than the power of a digital watch battery. At light speed, the radio signal took over 9 hours to reach us. The JPL website says, "The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing".

Galactic Exploration: Dr. Edward Van den Heuval at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands, is a recent winner of the $4 million dollar Spinoza Award. His daughter Marlene has been my best friend since 1990. He utilizes these antennas in his research. The Netherlands, USA and UK jointly launched the IRAS craft in 1983 into Earth's orbit, which took many famous beautiful infrared photos of the Andromeda and Milky Way Galaxies - which Hollywood has eagerly displayed in many sci-fi movies ever since!.

Archeology and ExtraTerrestrial Life - The technology which combined image data from visual, infrared, radar, ultraviolet and other frequencies can penetrate the earth, enabling a search for roadways and paths beneath the earth's surface such as that found in ancient underground architecture. Previously tested on flatlands near Oman, my father and Dr. Rochblatt contributed enhancements which enabled testing in the rocky, uneven, graded terrain of the Dead Sea Scroll area. In fact, it was tested there at my father's suggestion. This successful project utilized a powerful computer capable of combining and analyzing the data, not just sending the data to a lab for analysis. Because the computer is dedicated only to this function, it is small enough to travel on spacecraft in search of evidence of civilizations on other planets.

Award Winner - (a few recognitions c. 2000) I remember a telephone line tied up for days at a time while my dad ran programs on the computer mainframes at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena. Three JPL scientists won the H.A. Wheeler Applications Prize Paper Award for 1992 as the authors of the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation magazine. The winning paper was titled "On the Reflectivity of Complex Mesh Surfaces." The authors were Dr. William Imbriale, assistant manager for Microwaves and Dr. Victor Galindo, a senior research engineer in JPL's Ground Antennas and Facilities Engineering Section 332; and Dr. Yahya Rahmat-Samii, a senior research scientist in the JPL Spacecraft Telecommunications Section 336.

The following year, the following technical report was awarded the JPL Citation: V. Galindo, S.R. Rengarajan, W. Veruttipong and W.A. Imbriale, Design of a Correcting Plate for Compensating the Main Reflector Distortions of a Dual Shaped System, Ann Arbor, MI, June 27-July 2, 1993. My dad's long time colleague and friend, Dr. Raj Mittra (who has been a noted University professor for over 40 years), described another award winning paper of great importance. This was a paper:

"...on a new technique for analyzing reflector antennas using the Jacobi-Bessel polynomials, and it won a best paper award from the IEEE/AP Society. We did this work for JPL when Vic and I were working on prime focus and offset designing reflector antennas for the NASA Deep Space antenna projects. Later the computational scheme was used by many others to develop efficient codes for analyzing and synthesizing various reflector antennas. Vic is also known for his seminal contributions on the synthesis of dual reflectors that are used in many space and ground station antenna systems."

In a Special Session at JPL, Dr. Mittra honored my father: "Many-Faceted Contributions of Victor Galindo to the Analysis and Synthesis Problems Related to Reflector Antennas". Attending this session were a number of individuals mentioned here: Bill Imbriale, Bill Wong, David Rochblatt, Yahya Rahmat-Samii, and peers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute where my dad taught graduate engineering in the early 70's. I remember that students at Virginia Tech used to re-take the classes after they were flunked the first time around and thank my dad for making them get it right!

Globally Recognized: My father authored and co-authored hundreds of complex papers that were used in studies on related subjects worldwide from 1964 to date. My mother particularly remembers the importance of his work on the Jacobi-Bessel polynomials, which Dr. Mittra noted, too. As examples of how this research has been used, an article in InTech (March, 2010) cited two of my fathers' papers and an article published around 2000 by The Radiocommunications Agency of the Department of Trade and Industry in the UK cited three of his papers.

The UK Agency commissioned a study into modeling methods for large reflector antennas. The scope of work was to provide recommendations as to the most appropriate methods for predicting the gain patterns of large reflector antennas. An excerpt from the agency report, below, is somewhat understandable in laymen's terms although equations cannot be reproduced here (graphical images are not allowed in the text of Wall of Honor articles):

"Radioastronomical observations take place over an extended range within the radio frequency, microwave and millimetrewave parts of the spectrum. In order to be able to discriminate between individual and weak cosmic radio signals, radioastronomical observatories must be equipped with antennas offering significant values of gain and resolution. This usually implies that the radioastronomical antennas are very large both mechanically and electrically. For mechanically large radioastronomical antennas, direct measurement of the radiation pattern is at best an extremely difficult and costly problem, and often an impossible task. Under these circumstances, the problem of assessing the radiation patterns of large radioastronomical antennas can be approached in two ways: By employing accurate theoretical prediction methods, and by processing intermediate experimental results using theoretically sound and robust extrapolation algorithms.

The Jacobi-Bessel method [references cited here are shown below] factors the integral and expands an awkward exponential factor obtained in a Taylor series. Each term in the resulting expansion can be further expanded into a double series summation, using modified Jacobi polynomials for the radial direction, and a standard Fourier series for the circumferential variation. This finally yields a triple series where the integrals involving both source and field co-ordinates can be carried out in closed form, thereby realising the goal of completely decoupling the two sets of functions. The coefficients are double integrals of the current density with a kernel containing only source variables and are, therefore, independent of the field co-ordinates..... Hence, once [two factors] are determined, the field in any direction can be calculated from the series."

References:

Galindo, V. & Mittra, R. (1977). A new series representation for the radiation integral with application to reflector antennas. IEEE Trans Antennas Propagation, Vol AP-25, 1977, pp. 631-635.

Galindo, V. & Rahmat-Samii.(1981). A new look at Fresnel field computation using the Jacobi-Bessel series. IEEE Trans Antennas Propagation, Vol AP-29, 1981, pp. 885-898.

Rahmat-Samii & Galindo, V. (1980. Shaped reflector analysis using the Jacobi-Bessel series. IEEE Trans Antennas Propagation, Vol AP-28, 1980, pp. 425-435.

The 2010 InTech article stated: "The Jacobi-Bessel method is most suited for computing the pattern of antennas which have a circular projected aperture. Because the Jacobi polynomials satisfy a special type of recursion relationship, they are also useful for computing the radiation pattern of parabolic reflector antennas."

In conclusion - Dr. Victor Galindo, my dad, may be little known outside of scientific circles, but he is globally respected and recognized as a leader in his field. He is called upon continually to analyze and improve upon complex technologies developed around the world. This is just a sample of the functional outcomes of more than FIVE decades of ongoing brilliant research and application, for which my father is uniquely responsible.

With love - Dr. Stephanie D. Galindo (updated 2016)