Lippincott was born in 1920 and attended college at the University of Pennsylvania College for Women in the 1940s, where she played on the women's basketball team.[5]
After graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Lippincott attended Swarthmore College, where she worked closely with Peter van de Kamp on many astrometry projects between 1945 and his retirement in 1972, when she became observatory director. She wrote his obituary when he died in 1995.[6]
She was the third wife of Dave Garroway, the founding host of NBC'sToday show. Garroway had an active interest in astronomy, and they met on a tour of observatories in the Soviet Union that she was hosting.[7] After Garroway's death by suicide at their home in 1982, she helped establish the Dave Garroway Laboratory for the Study of Depression at the University of Pennsylvania.[8]
She conducted numerous astrometric studies of nearby stars with van de Kamp in the search for extrasolar planets. She reported the discovery of several objects of substellar mass and proposed a 0.01 solar-mass planetary companion to the star Lalande 21185 in 1951. The same proposal of planetary objects was made for a number of other stars, as well.[9] Claims for the smaller planetary objects were never confirmed and gradually have become discredited. However, she was quite successful in using the same techniques for characterizing many binary star systems. Her 1951 calculations of the orbit of the difficult astronomical binary star systemRoss 614 were used to successfully find and image the system's secondary star.[10] These calculations were used by Walter Baade to find and optically resolve this binary system for the first time using the then new 5 m (200 in) Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.[11]
She is listed as professor emerita of astronomy and director emerita of the Sproul Observatory in the 2010 Swarthmore college catalog. She last published astronomy research papers in 1983. In 2009, she attended the dedication ceremony for the new Peter van de Kamp observatory at Swarthmore College.[12]
Lippincott died on February 28, 2019, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.[3]
^Lippincott, Sarah Lee (December 1995). "Obituary: Peter van de Kamp, 1901-1995". Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. 27 (4): 1483–1484. Bibcode:1995BAAS...27.1483L.
^"S. I. Lippincott received the honorary D.Sc. degree by Villanova University in Pennsylvania". Mercury. 2 (3): 15. 1973. Bibcode:1973Mercu...2R..15.{{cite journal}}: External link in |journal= (help)
