Spy Satellite Pioneer, Celestial Mapmaker. Davies received an AB in mathematics from Stanford University in 1938, then taught mathematics for two years at the University of Nevada. He joined the RAND Corporation in 1947 and remained on staff for the rest of his life. In the early 1950's, he began his career in military reconnaissance and was a key contributor to the development of the CORONA system, which became the world's first reconnaissance satellite that took pictures of Earth from orbit. He became one of the world's foremost experts in using deep-space photographs to map the planets, a process known as planetary photogrammetry. The maps that he helped create became guides for future generations of space explorers. His career spanned from the earliest orbiter missions to the Moon to marathon voyages to Mars, Venus, Mercury and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. In the early 1960s, he performed top-secret work for the Air Force intelligence division working on cold war reconnaissance to the scientific projects of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. For nearly 40 years he was on NASA's imaging teams for unmanned space missions like Mariner, Voyager and Galileo. In 1976, he became the founding chairman of the IAU/IAG Working Group on Cartographic Coordinates and Rotational Elements of the Planets and Satellites and was also a member of a newly created task group that reported to the IAU where he helped to name the new moons and the myriads of surface features revealed on planets and satellites by the missions in which he participated. In recognition of his work, Davies received the Talbert Abrams award of the American Society of Photogrammetry in 1974 and in 1999, he became a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. The Martian crater Davies is named after him.