NY Times Obit: J. G. Baker, Designer of High-Altitude Camera Lenses, Dies at 90

July 13, 2005
J. G. Baker, Designer of High-Altitude Camera Lenses, Dies at 90
By JEREMY PEARCE

James G. Baker, an astronomer who designed powerful lenses and cameras for the U-2
spy plane in the 1950's and became a pioneer of satellite reconnaissance in the
cold war, died on June 29 at his home in Bedford, N.H. He was 90.

His death was reported by his son Neal.

Dr. Baker conceived and began to build lenses for aerial cameras used by military
aircraft for mapping and reconnaissance by the Army and Navy in World War II while
he was still a graduate student.

After the war, Dr. Baker advised the Air Force Photographic Laboratory and refined
his work on high-altitude optical systems. He designed the lenses used by the U-2,
which flew at 70,000 feet to escape detection and capture images of Soviet troops
and missiles.

Intelligence derived from flights of the U-2 was credited with helping to temper
concerns about Soviet military superiority during the Eisenhower administration and
was later used to verify launching sites in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

In the late 1950's, with the launchings of the first satellites, Dr. Baker, in
collaboration with Joseph Nunn, developed the Baker-Nunn satellite tracking camera,
which allowed observers to follow the course and trajectory of the Soviet satellite
Sputnik in 1957. The camera uses an expansive field of view to photograph large
swaths of sky and record the progress of satellites and other objects.

Robert S. Hilbert, an optical designer and president of Optical Research
Associates, a design firm in Pasadena, Calif., said that the Baker-Nunn camera
provided "an unprecedented combination of speed, wide field of view and image
quality" and that, 45 years later, "for the same purpose, no better camera or
design exists than the Baker-Nunn today."

Dr. Baker later helped create the camera systems used in the Air Force's high-speed
reconnaissance plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, in use from the 1960's until the 1990's.

As an independent contractor to Polaroid, Eastman Kodak and other companies, Dr.
Baker also applied his research to consumer products. In the late 1960's, at the
invitation of Edwin Land, the Polaroid chairman, Dr. Baker designed the optical
system for the folding SX-70 Land Camera, which instantly developed its images and
became internationally popular in the 1970's.

In earlier work in astronomy, Dr. Baker improved the accuracy of existing
telescopes and designed the Baker Super-Schmidt camera, which he developed to
photograph meteors. With George Z. Dimitroff, he wrote the 1945 book "Telescopes
and Accessories."

James Gilbert Baker was born in Louisville, Ky. He earned his undergraduate degree
in mathematics from the University of Louisville in 1935.

He received his doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard in 1942 and
had been affiliated with its observatory since the 1930's.

In 1960, Dr. Baker was named president of the Optical Society of America, and in
1965 he was awarded its highest honor, the Frederick Ives Medal. He was a fellow of
the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Baker is survived by his wife of 67 years, the former Elizabeth Breitenstein.

Besides his son Neal, a remote-imaging specialist, of Annapolis, Md., he is
survived by two other sons, Dennis, a meteorologist, of Ann Arbor, Mich., and
Kirby, a mathematician, of Los Angeles; a daughter, Brenda Baker, a computer
scientist, of Berkeley Heights, N.J.; and five grandchildren.
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