News

On July 9, 2014, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Mezger passed away at the age of 85, after a long illness. As a director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Peter Mezger was a key figure during the creation and throughout the first 15 years of IRAM. His close relations with the French radio astronomy community allowed the French and German groups to find the mutual understanding and direct exchange necessary for the setup of such a complex co-operation.

Peter Mezger and his group were in charge of the construction of the IRAM 30m telescope. An outstanding scientist, Peter Mezger was also an intense user of the IRAM facilities, and in particular the 30m telescope, for which his group at the MPIfR in Bonn built groundbreaking instruments for observations of cold interstellar dust. Peter Mezger was a long-standing member of the IRAM executive council, and he organized broad support for IRAM in the 1980s and early 1990s.

For his former collaborators and colleagues at IRAM, his death is a great loss.

Karl-Friedrich Schuster
IRAM