Fred Lawrence Whipple was born on 5 November 1906, on a farm in Red Oak, Iowa. When he was 15, the family moved to California. There, Whipple studied mathematics at Occidental College and at the University of California at Los Angeles. As a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in 1930, he was one of the first to compute the orbit of the newly discovered planet Pluto. On receiving his PhD in 1931, he joined the staff of the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He became chairman of Harvard University's astronomy department in 1949, then director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1955 until 1973.
At Harvard, Whipple developed a photographic tracking network of professional and amateur observers with the aim of determining the trajectories of meteors from two or more simultaneous observations. To fill the daytime gap when meteors could not be photographed, Whipple organized another programme for the detection of these objects using radio-wavelength observations. Eventually, in collaboration with Richard McCrosky and others, he concluded that most meteors were on comet-like orbits; fewer than 1% of the sporadic meteors visible to the naked eye could be traced to an origin outside the Solar System. During his career, he discovered six comets. He liked to quip that anyone could discover a comet — all it took was time. He also discovered the asteroid 1252 Celestia, which he named after his mother; asteroid 1940 was renamed 1940 Whipple, in his honour.
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