until September 30, 2011, and professor of astronomy and electrical engineering at Cornell University. In 1992 he was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Lindau (Katlenburg-Lindau) in Germany, a position he held until his retirement in 1998. Hagfors was chairman of EISCAT Council from 1995 to 1996, chairman of the space science committee in the Norwegian Research Council from 1992 to 1997, and member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 1995. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Tromsø, Norway, Nagoya University in Japan, and Lancaster University in Great Britain. Hagfors's research was very broad, comprising amongst other things ionospheric modification (heating), radar astronomy within the Solar System, observations of planetary surfaces from space, techniques in radio remote sensing, scattering from rough surfaces, thermal fluctuations in complex plasmas, antennas and radio wave propagation. He published around 170 scientific papers. Death Tor Hagfors died of a heart attack in Puerto Rico on 17 January 2007. Honours Asteroid 1985 VD1 was named 7279 Hagfors in 2000. Awards 1987 URSI Van der Pol Gold Medal 1989 Senior Humboldt fellowship 1995 Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters 1998 Associate member, Royal Astronomical Society 2002 EISCAT's Sir Granville Beynon medal 2002 Doctor honoris causa University of Oulu 2003 Honorary doctor University of Tromsø 2003 William E. Gordon and Elva Gordon distinguished lecture at the Arecibo Observatory on November 3, 2003. References Obituary, Astronomy and Geophysics, June 2007, 48(3) p. 3.37 Short biography Obituary (p. 65–66) in Radio Science Bulletin, March 2007 Obituary of the Max Planck Society, Annual Report of the MPS 2007, page 16 (in German) 1930 births 2007 deaths Norwegian physicists Norwegian Institute of Technology alumni Cornell University faculty Members of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters MIT Lincoln Laboratory people Max Planck Institute directors