George Whipple Clark (August 31, 1928 – April 6, 2023) was an American astronomer and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[1] In the 1950s Clark worked with Bruno Rossi and other collaborators on several large cosmic ray air shower experiments that used the novel methods of density sampling and fast timing to measure the energy spectrum of the primary cosmic rays to 1 billion billion (10^18) electron volts and to determine the distribution of their celestial arrival directions.
[1] He received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award for his work with Claude R. Canizares on the Focal Plane Crystal Spectrometer experiment on the Einstein X-Ray Observatory.
He was a principal scientist for satellite experiments that resulted in the discovery of high-energy gamma rays from galactic and extra-galactic sources.
Clark was the Principal Investigator for the MIT X-Ray Observatory on the Third Small Astronomy Satellite.