Mr. Borucki's Lonely Road to the Light

摘要

At 74, many men are happy to while away their time gardening or playing poker or watching reruns of old sitcoms. William Borucki, the architect and principal investigator of NASA's exoplanet search mission, Kepler, is cut from a different cloth. On weekends, he likes to take off with his wife, Josephine, and his boyhood buddy, Gene Westerberg, to trek through Alum Rock Park, a few miles east of San Jose, in search of kempite, a rare manganese mineral found nowhere else on Earth. So far, Borucki hasn't found any, and perhaps he never will. It doesn't matter. Borucki's journey is his destination.