Robert Sutton Harrington

Who was Robert Sutton Harrington?

Robert Sutton Harrington was an American astronomer who worked at the United States Naval Observatory. Harrington was born near Newport News, Virginia. His father was an archaeologist. He was married to Betty-Jean Maycock in 1976, with two daughters, Amy and Ann.

Harrington worked at the USNO. Another astronomer there, James W. Christy, consulted with him after discovering bulges in the images of Pluto, which turned out to be Pluto's satellite Charon. For this reason, some consider Harrington to be a co-discoverer of Charon, although Christy usually gets sole credit. By the laws of physics, it is easy to determine the mass of a binary system based on its orbital period, so Harrington was the first to calculate the mass of the Pluto-Charon system, which was lower than even the lowest previous estimates of Pluto's mass.

Harrington became a believer in the existence of a Planet X beyond Pluto and undertook searches for it, with positive results coming from the IRAD probe in 1983. Harrington collaborated initially with T. C. Van Flandern.