Don Backer, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley who discovered the first millisecond pulsar, died on July 25. He was director of Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory and the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, California - a collection of 42 dishes that recently began scanning the sky and searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.
"Memories of a special moment with Don Backer"
By Jill Tarter
Don and I had only a few glancing interactions from the time we were engineering physics students at Cornell until one memorable day in 1982. On that day I pulled my…
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