Robert Benjamin Leighton (/ˈleɪtən/ LAY-tən; September 10, 1919 – March 9, 1997) was a prominent American experimental physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
He was accepted to Caltech as a junior in 1939 but continued to live at home, helping support his mother and himself with a job building X-ray equipment for the Kellogg Laboratory.
His doctoral dissertation explored the specific heat of face-centered cubic crystals, advised by William V. Houston and Paul Sophus Epstein.
Even more striking were his discoveries of a remarkable five-minute oscillation in local surface velocities and of a "super-granulation pattern" of horizontal convection currents in large cells of moving material.
Starting in 1965, he and Gerry Neugebauer used the new telescope to sweep the roughly 70 percent of the sky visible from Mount Wilson Observatory, collecting the data as squiggles on a strip-chart recorder.
The resulting Two-Micron Sky Survey, published in 1969, contained 5,612 infrared sources, the vast majority of which had been previously uncataloged.
Leighton's development of photographic equipment during the mid-1950s had allowed him to obtain the best pictures of the planets ever attained to that time, from the 60 and 100-inch telescopes, and led to his work as team leader at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the Imaging Science Investigations on the Mariner 4, 6, and 7 missions to Mars during the middle 1960s.
As Team Leader and an experienced experimental physicist, Leighton played a key role in forming and guiding the development of JPL's first digital television system for use in deep space: the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars in 1964.
He received the Space Science Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for the Mariner television experiments in 1967 and the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1971.
In the 1970s, Leighton's interest shifted to the development of large, inexpensive dish antenna which could be used to pursue millimeter-wave interferometry and submillimeter-wave astronomy.