Gaia People

Hans-Heinrich Bernstein (1953-2013)

Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Heidelberg

On 4 June 2013 our former Gaia colleague Hans-Heinrich Bernstein passed away after having had to spend the last two years of his life in a special-care home. Following a failure of his heart in December 2010 he was severely handicapped. The community had missed him since then already.

Being a trained geodesist, Hans entered astronomy via a PhD thesis at ARI on the usage of pulsar timing for purposes of astrometry and reference system determination. In 1983 he started working on the astrometric parameter determination within the FAST consortium of HIPPARCOS, especially on double stars. Later, Hans participated in the DIVA data analysis where he worked on the DIVA sphere reconstruction. In the Gaia project he contributed to the CU3 First Look task, where he invented the mathematical basis of the one-day astrometric solution (ODAS). In addition he worked on several aspects of double-star parameter determination for Gaia in the framework of CU4.

We will keep Hans in our memories and feel with his wife Andrea and his son Christian. The latter is seen on his father's arm in the photo of about 2005. He has grown up to the age of 10 meanwhile and remained to be an important focus of Hans' life.

[Published: 18/06/2013]