Richard Binzel has long held a see-for-yourself attitude toward astronomy. It developed in 1970, when he received a Criterion RV6 telescope for his 12th birthday. It was on a cold Ohio night looking through that telescope at the rings of Saturn that he first realized he wanted to be a planetary astronomer. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, how fantastic planets are. That’s what I want to study when I grow up,’” says Binzel. It didn’t take him long to get there. Binzel turned that passion into a successful career. Known for…
