Edward Purdy Ney (October 28, 1920 – July 9, 1996) was an American physicist who made major contributions to cosmic ray research, atmospheric physics, heliophysics, and infrared astronomy.

[1] In February 1940,[4] Nier prepared a tiny but pure sample of Uranium-235, which he mailed to Columbia University, where John R. Dunning and his team proved that this isotope was responsible for nuclear fission, rather than the more abundant Uranium-238.

Ney brought experience and equipment that contributed significantly to Beams's wartime project to develop gas centrifuges for separation of uranium isotopes.

[9] After the war, he recognized the research potential of large plastic balloons, which had been invented by Jean Piccard and were being manufactured at the General Mills Laboratories in the Como neighborhood of Minneapolis.

[12] In 1948, the Minnesota group collaborated with Bernard Peters and Helmut L. Bradt, of the University of Rochester, to launch a balloon flight carrying a cloud chamber and emulsions.

In both emulsions and cloud chambers, these "stripped" heavy nuclei leave an unmistakable track, which is much denser and "hairier" than that of protons, and whose characteristics make it possible to determine their atomic number.

[15] In 1950, with the aid of a cloud chamber that contained lead plates, Ney, together with Charles Critchfield and graduate student Sophie Oleksa, searched for primary cosmic ray electrons.

[20] During the Cold War, the United States sponsored several heavily funded and top secret attempts to carry out surveillance of the Soviet Union by means of balloon overflights.

[22] While the project was active, Ney and his coworkers carried out 313 major or experimental balloon flights, published 16 technical reports,[22] and patented approximately 20 inventions.

Members of this panel, whose chairman was Verner E. Suomi, were Ney, Charles B. Moore, Alvin Howell,[35] James K. Angell,[36] J. Allen Hynek, and Martin Schwarzschild,[37] who was the prime mover behind Stratoscope.

[40] With the aid of standard radiosonde equipment, Ney's student, John L. Gergen, carried out 380 radiation temperature soundings in parallel with the balloon project.

Jim Rosen studied aerosols with an optical coincidence counter, which was so good it still has not been improved; he was the first to discover thin laminar layers of dust in the stratosphere and to identify the source as volcanic eruptions.

With Winckler and Freier, Ney proposed to keep balloons aloft (nearly) continuously to monitor the intensity of cosmic rays during the period of maximum solar activity that coincided with the IGY.

When this ambitious proposal was funded, Freier and Ney took responsibility for emulsion packs that went on every flight, and Winckler designed a payload that combined an ionization chamber with a geiger counter.

On the first day of the IGY, this scheme paid off, when Winckler and his students, Laurence E. Peterson, Roger Arnoldy and Robert Hoffman, observed X rays whose intensity followed temporal variations of an aurora over Minneapolis.

[47] After Fowler had returned to Bristol, Freier, Ney and Winckler observed a very high intensity of particles on March 26, 1958, which examination of the emulsions proved were mostly low-energy protons, and which were associated with a solar flare.

Ney and his colleagues decided to perform these measurements during the eclipse of October 2, 1959, which was visible from North Africa, where there was only a small chance that clouds over the Sahara would spoil the observations.

[55] To confirm and extend these observations, Ney organized an expedition to The Forks, Maine and Senneterre, Quebec, where he set up two polarimeters to measure the corona during the eclipse of July 20, 1963.

In 1963, Ney went to Australia on sabbatical leave, where he helped Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Q. Twiss to construct the Narrabri Stellar Intensity Interferometer.

When he returned, Ney left behind a working instrument, but with the advice of Fred Hoyle, who he met in Australia, had decided to focus his attention on a field of broader scope: infrared astronomy.

[68] After Stein completed his Ph.D. in 1964, he went to Princeton University to help Professor Robert E. Danielson, an earlier Ney student, carry out infrared observations on Stratoscope II.

Until Ney began his infrared studies, astronomical research at Minnesota had been carried out mainly by Willem Luyten, who was an expert on white dwarf stars and is credited with coining this name in 1922.

Armed with this insight, he approached Nancy Boggess,[71] who had just taken responsibility for NASA's infrared astronomy programs, and who quickly authorized funding for a Minnesota observatory.

[73] The next winter, Woolf and Ney discovered that infrared radiation from certain cool stars exhibits a spectral feature which indicates that they are surrounded by grains of carbon and silicate minerals.

To explain them, Allen and Ney suggested that large rocks in contact with deep subsurface layers cooled more slowly than the loosely packed regolith.

[76] Despite the success of the O'Brien Observatory, the Minnesota/UCSD group realized that they needed regular access to a large infrared telescope located at a high altitude site.

They obtained funding from their two universities, the National Science Foundation, and from Fred Hoyle, who offered a contribution with the understanding that aspiring British infrared astronomers would be trained at Minnesota.

[68] After Woolf's student, Robert Gehrz, completed a search for suitable sites, the group decided on Mount Lemmon, whose proximity to a source of liquid helium at the University of Arizona greatly simplified the logistics.

[80] Similarly, Frank McDonald joined Goddard in 1959 as head of the Energetic Particles Branch in the Space Science Division, where he was project scientist on nine satellite programs.

[59]Commenting on the discovery of carbon and silicate grains around aging stars: In a cosmology dominated by Hydrogen and Helium, it was a relief to find a source of the material that forms the terrestrial planets.