Born in Detroit in 1919, Robert B. Leighton did ground-breaking work in solid state physics, cosmic ray physics, the beginnings of modern particle physics, solar physics, planetary photography, infrared astronomy, and millimeter- and submillimeter-wave astronomy over the course of his life. He was widely known for his innovative design of scientific instruments, and was deeply admired as a teacher, having authored a highly influential text, Principles of Modern Physics, before joining the team developing The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

In the early 1950s Leighton played a key role in showing the muon decays into two neutrinos and an electron, and made the first measurement of the energy spectrum of the decay electron. He was the first to observe strange particle decays after their initial discovery, and elucidated many of the properties of the new strange particles.

In the mid-1950s Leighton devised Doppler-shift and Zeeman-effect solar cameras. With the Zeeman camera, Leighton and his students mapped the sun's magnetic field with excellent resolution, leading to striking discoveries of a five-minute oscillation in local solar surface velocities and of a “super-granulation pattern,” thus opening a new field: solar seismology. Leighton also designed and built equipment to make clearer images of the planets, and opened another new field: adaptive optics. His were considered the best images of the planets until the era of space exploration with probes began in the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, Leighton developed a novel, inexpensive infrared telescope, producing the first survey of the sky at 2.2 microns, which revealed an unexpectedly large number of objects in our galaxy too cool to be seen with the human eye. During the mid-1960s he was Team Leader at JPL for Imaging Science Investigations on the Mariner 4, 6, and 7 missions to Mars. Leighton played a key role in the development of JPL's first deep-space digital television system, and contributed to early efforts at image processing and enhancement techniques.

In the 1970s, Leighton's interest shifted to the development of large, inexpensive dish antennae that could be used to pursue millimeter-wave interferometry and submillimeter-wave astronomy. Once again, his remarkable experimental abilities opened a new field of science, which continues to be vigorously pursued at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.

Robert Leighton died on March 9, 1997, in Pasadena, California.