Named in honor of Irwin I. Shapiro {1929– }, physicist associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and with Harvard University during the past three decades, and since 1983 the director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Shapiro has been responsible for major advances in radio and radar science, and he has made fundamental theoretical and observational contributions to celestial mechanics, astrometry, astrophysics, gravitation physics, geophysics and planetary physics. His planetary ephemerides, considered among the best available, have been used for virtually every Arecibo Observatory radar observation of asteroids, comets, planets, and the satellites of Mars and Jupiter. The underlying ephemeris software also constitutes a primary tool for analysis of VLBI measurements, whose diverse applications include high-precision terrestrial geodesy. During the early 1960s Shapiro played a central... _ _.