In Memoriam: Paolo Farinella

The career of Paolo Farinella, 47, was tragically and prematurely ended when he died on March 25, 2000, of complications following congestive heart failure. Born near Ferrara, Italy, with a congenital heart defect, Farinella had a severely restricted childhood until undergoing one of the first open heart surgeries in Italy at age eight that successfully corrected the defect. He received his education at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa where he was strongly influenced by the lectures of Giuseppe Colombo. With colleagues Andrea Milani and Anna Nobili, he established the Space Mechanics Group at the University of Pisa, which rapidly became one of the outstanding research centers in planetary science in Italy. His contributions to the understanding of the origin and evolution of small bodies of the Solar System were fundamental and will be enduring. Of the more than 250 scientific papers he authored (an additional 125 or so articles were on popular science or disarmament), 200 were on the topics of small body dynamics and collisional evolution of asteroids, Trojans, comets and Kuiper Belt objects. He provided new insights and understanding of how bodies are transported from the main asteroid belt into Earth-crossing orbits where they are a source of potential impactors — the so-called potentially hazardous asteroids. Farinella and coworkers were the first to point out that the strong asteroidal resonances are actually too strong: most of the asteroids that are injected into these resonances fall into the Sun.