Bevan Sharpless

Bevan Percival Sharpless (August 2, 1904 – October 28, 1950)[1] was an American astronomer, best known for his 1944 discovery that the orbit of Phobos was decaying.

[7] He was a member of a USNO expedition to Niuafo'ou in the Tonga Islands to make observations of the solar eclipse of October 21, 1930.

[8][9] In 1929, Harry Edward Burton, head of the Equatorial Division at the USNO, discovered anomalies in the orbital longitude of Phobos, the larger moon of Mars.

Another USNO astronomer, Edgar W. Woolard, published on the same secular accelerations in 1944 (naming Sharpless as the inspiration), but his work was focused on numerical rather than observational analysis.

[13] Though Shklovsky later claimed to Patrick Moore that the paper was nothing more than a practical joke,[13] it was taken seriously by others including Carl Sagan and national science adviser Fred Singer, who commented:[14] If the satellite is indeed spiraling inward as deduced from astronomical observation, then there is little alternative to the hypothesis that it is hollow and therefore Martian made.

Additionally, the orbital decay is caused not by atmospheric drag, but by solid body tidal forces not considered by Shklovsky.