Kenneth Nordtvedt

Kenneth Leon Nordtvedt is an American physicist. He was born on April 16, 1939, in Chicago, Illinois. Nordtvedt graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960) and Stanford University (Ph.D., 1964) and was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1963–1965). Soon after witnessing the Sputnik spacecraft cross the Boston sky in fall of 1957, he became a part-time student employee for the Mars Probe project at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, and in early 1960s was staff physicist at the same Laboratory's project to develop the Apollo Mission's navigation and guidance system.