Matvey Matveyevich Gusev () (, Vyatka,

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

–,

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

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) was a Russian astronomer who worked at Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg from 1850 to 1852 and then at Vilnius Observatory. In 1860 he founded the first scientific journal dedicated to math and physics in Russia: ''Vestnik matematicheskikh nauk'' (). He became the director of the Vilnius Observatory in 1865. He was first to prove the non-

sphericity Sphericity is a measure of how closely the shape of a physical object resembles that of a perfect sphere. For example, the sphericity of the ball (bearing), balls inside a ball bearing determines the quality (business), quality of the bearing, ...

of the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It Orbit of the Moon, orbits around Earth at Lunar distance, an average distance of (; about 30 times Earth diameter, Earth's diameter). The Moon rotation, rotates, with a rotation period (lunar ...

, concluding in 1860 that it is elongated in the direction of the

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

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article o
Gusev
/ref> He is considered one of the pioneers in using photography in astronomy, having taken pictures of the Moon and the Sun - including

sunspot Sunspots are temporary spots on the Sun's surface that are darker than the surrounding area. They are one of the most recognizable Solar phenomena and despite the fact that they are mostly visible in the solar photosphere they usually aff ...

s - while at the Vilnius observatory. He died in Berlin, Germany in 1866. A major crater on

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", because of its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous carbon dioxide () atmosphere. At the average surface level the atmosph ...

is named

Gusev crater Gusev is a crater on the planet Mars and is located at and is in the Aeolis quadrangle. The crater is about 166 kilometers in diameter and formed approximately three to four billion years ago. It was named after Russian astronomer Matvey Guse ...

after him, and it is famed as the landing site of the

Mars Exploration Rover NASA's Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was a robotic space mission involving two Mars rovers, ''Spirit (rover), Spirit'' and ''Opportunity (rover), Opportunity'', exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the launch of the two rove ...

'' Spirit''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gusev, Matvey Matveyevich 1826 births 1866 deaths 19th-century astronomers from the Russian Empire