Denton C. Anderson, physicist who worked on the Voyager space missions, dies

Jacques Kelly, Baltimore Sun
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Denton C. Anderson, a physicist who worked on the nuclear power aspects of the Voyager space exploration missions, died of heart failure Saturday at Gilchrist Towson Care. The Timonium resident was 94.

Born in the Worcester County community of Bishop where his mother was visiting family, he was the son of Frederick Cosman Anderson Jr., an undertaker, and Alberta S. Davis, a homemaker.

He was raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, and attended public schools before earning a degree in physics at Columbia University in 1951. He also studied at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Anderson met his future wife, Marion Ells Smith, on a blind date while she was a nursing student at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York.

He served in the Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground and worked briefly for the manufacturer Johns-Manville Corp. in Manville, New Jersey.

“My father was quiet, introspective and reticent,” said his son, James C. Anderson. “He had a sense of humor and was the kind of person who enjoyed a good pun.”

He moved to Baltimore in the 1950s and initially lived on Brixton Road before settling in Timonium.

He joined the Glenn L. Martin Co., later Martin Marietta, and was part of a spin-off company, Teledyne Energy Systems of Hunt Valley.

He was a reliability manager at Teledyne and from 1966 to 1968 was part of the Nimbus Weather Satellite Mission, working on aspects of the robotic spacecraft involved in meteorological research.

Mr. Anderson joined a team that worked on the 1977 Voyager Interstellar Missions 1 and 2 spacecraft.

NASA’s website described the space vehicles “as exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before.”

According to NASA, “Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago.”

The mission explored Jupiter and Saturn and found “active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and intricacies of Saturn’s rings…”

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“My father’s particular involvement was with the nuclear power sources used to generate the electricity that sent the Voyager communications back to Earth,” said his son, James.

“He never expressed a desire to go up in space but he was very interested in how you get there,” his son said.

He retired from Teledyne in 1997 and remained a consultant for several years.

Mr. Anderson began running throughout Timonium when he turned 40.

“He quit smoking and started running,” said his daughter, Susan A. Gury. “It was something he did regardless of the weather. He wore socks on his hands to keep his fingers warm. He usually ran about three to four miles, six days a week. He always took Fridays off.”

Survivors include a son, James C. Anderson, of Augusta, Georgia; two daughters, Deborah J. Anderson, of Raleigh, North Carolina, and Susan A. Gury, of Rising Sun, Cecil County; and two grandsons.

Services were private.