Gordon Pettengill was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts where he developed a fascination with radio and electronics.
When he turned 18, he was drafted into the United States Army where he served in the infantry and then with a Signal Corps company stationed in Austria.
His earliest research extending beyond the Earth's orbit was with this same radar in 1961; he used it to make the first ranging measurements to another planet, Venus.
[7] In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pettengill led ground-based radar studies of the surface properties of all of the inner planets, including the Earth's (via a "triple-bounce" experiment: Moon-Earth-Moon).
Pettengill also played a leading role in the first radar studies of an asteroid (Icarus, in 1968), a comet (Encke, in 1980), and moons of other planets (the Galilean satellites, starting in 1976).
[citation needed] His observations embraced Mercury, Venus, Mars, several asteroids and comets, the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.