Martin Harwit, Cornell professor emeritus of astronomy and former chair of the astronomy department, has been awarded the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's most prestigious award, the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal for lifetime achievement in astronomy.

In a career focused on infrared and submillimeter radio astronomy, Harwit pioneered the use of rockets to send infrared detectors above the atmosphere, and worked with NASA's Learjet and Kuiper flying observatories. He was one of the original planners of NASA's Great Observatories program, which led to the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope. He served as director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., from 1987 to 1995.

Still active as a professor emeritus, Harwit is a member of the science team of the Submillimeter Wave Astronomical Satellite; a mission scientist on the European Space Agency's Far Infrared/Submillimeter Telescope, Herschel; principal investigator on a study of the potential construction of a kilometer-baseline far-infrared/submillimeter wave interferometer in space; and a member of a team submitting a proposal to NASA to build an optical coronagraph to detect and conduct spectroscopy on Jupiter-sized planets in orbit around nearby stars.

His theoretical contributions include early work on the anticipated appearance of young massive stars still enveloped in their cocoon of dust and gas, predictions of the infrared emission from zodiacal cloud dust grains and the existence of starburst galaxies.

Long interested in history and philosophy of science, Harwit is the author of "Cosmic Discovery: The Search, Scope and Heritage of Astronomy," arguing that new discoveries in science are primarily the result of new instrumentation. He is also the author of the textbook "Astrophysical Concepts."

Harwit earned his B.A. at Oberlin College, master's degree at the University of Michigan and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in physics. After postdoctoral work with Fred Hoyle at Cambridge University, he joined the Cornell faculty in 1962.

Previous winners of the Bruce Gold Medal, which has been awarded most years since 1898, include such influential astronomers as Walter Baade, Edwin Hubble and Fred Hoyle, as well as Cornell's Hans Bethe and Edwin Salpeter and alumna Vera Cooper Rubin.