John Aloysius O'Keefe

Who was John Aloysius O'Keefe?

John Aloysius O'Keefe was a planetary scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from 1958 to 1995. He is credited with the discovery of Earth's "pear shape" using U.S. Vanguard satellite data collected in the late 1950s. He was the first to propose the idea of a scanning microscope in 1956 and he is the co-discoverer of the YORP effect, an effect resulting from sunlight which causes a small celestial body such as an asteroid or meteor to spin up or down. O'Keefe was a practicing Roman Catholic.

During the early Project Apollo-era, O'Keefe was one of the major leaders in developing the American lunar science program and was instrumental in securing astrogeologist Eugene Shoemaker to work with NASA in developing a geology program for the Apollo astronauts.

Prior to the moon landings O'Keefe developed a theory that tektites, natural glass objects found in discrete strewn fields around the world, are actually volcanic ejecta from the Moon. He suggested that explosive, hydrogen-driven lunar volcanoes may be the mechanism that launched the tektites to Earth.