Michael Drake

People like Kuiper, Pat Roemer, Tom Gehrels, and Frank Low, who were the senior people at the time, realized that a new discipline was being founded. Before that, anything off the Earth had been astronomy. Yet in practice, with Apollo, you’re returning rocks, which isn’t what astronomers do, it’s what geologists do, and you’re analyzing rocks and using chemical analysis techniques to do that, and that’s chemistry. If you wanted to understand what was in the middle of Jupiter, what was it like, you certainly couldn’t send a spacecraft there, and you couldn’t look at it with a telescope, so you had to turn to physics.

It became clear that there was this new discipline, planetary science, that involved physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, atmospheric science, and other fields as well, that really were critical if we wanted to understand our immediate cosmic surroundings in the planetary system in which the Earth is embedded.

It’s to their credit, those four folks, that they had that insight. They persuaded the University, the regents and the legislature that they should found an academic department that would essentially be the teaching arm of the research Lunar and Planetary Lab. Since 1973, while they are technically different organizations, they have in fact been so intertwined with each other than they’re not physically separable.

Steve Larson

Those were electric times, I must say, to have all these new people come in who were specialists in fields outside of planetary astronomy. There were the geochemists; there were plasma physicists; there were people who were experts in the formation of the solar system. We had this colloquium series, and every week someone would give a talk, and it was just absolutely fantastic to listen and learn from people. That gained momentum, and we were having people come in from elsewhere to give classes and also seminars and whatnot, and stay here for a month or two. Every big name in the field was coming. It was just a tremendous time of growth.

For those people like myself who were here, it was a real eye-opener to a lot of things in planetary sciences that we didn’t participate much in and know a lot about, you known, like analysis of Moon rocks. I think even the people that came here also felt that way. They were being exposed to things they hadn’t known, so there was all of this synergy going on.

Harold Larson 

The original building was constructed with no classrooms. No teaching was to take place here. The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory was a pure research organization within this University. No one taught until the mid-seventies when the University wanted to make the stand-alone research organizations—Steward Observatory, the Lunar Lab, other places like that—participate more in the education program. When the new building was built, the addition, that’s where all our classrooms are.

Now NASA would look back on that and say that’s silly, because education and research are so important to couple, but back then, it was a very introverted view. NASA needed this place for research and didn’t want it encumbered with education. And the University said fine. We want the visibility, the prestige, and everything that comes with a research institution, and you don’t have to teach.

Kuiper was instrumental in defining, at least initially, what the Department of Planetary Science would be. But he died before it came to fruition. It was others that picked it up—but they picked up the pieces that he was already trying to put together.

The Department was created with the intent of just training PhDs. Looking back on it, it was still a privileged place to work in that we were somewhat immunized from students; only the best and the brightest of the grad students.

Bill Sandel

I started out as a member of a research group headed by Lyle Broadfoot at Kitt Peak National Observatory. I joined that very late in 1972. That group moved, as a group, first to the University of Southern California, although we were still housed in Tucson. That was our umbrella administrative organization. A few years later a number of us in the group moved to the Lunar and Planetary Lab.

At that time I was working on the Voyager ultraviolet spectrometer. Lyle was the Principal Investigator for that. I originally came on the project to work on the detector development. After the Voyager launched in 1977, I stayed on and became involved in the science. 

Floyd Herbert

Lyle Broadfoot was the Principal Investigator for the Ultraviolet Spectrometer [UVS] on Voyager. They started their own branch of the University of Southern California at Tucson, they called it, down in South Tucson. They rented a warehouse down there, right in the middle of the junkyard district, and they ran their part of this mission out of that warehouse. I joined their group, oh, about a year before Voyager encountered Uranus, which was a big deal. Voyager went to four planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and their satellites. That was an immensely successful mission.

That was kind of the second half of my career, when I joined Lyle’s Garage, as we called it. Everybody calls that place Lyle’s Garage. Even when we moved up here to campus, everybody still calls us Lyle’s Garage. The place next door was an automobile junkyard, and every once in a while somebody would come into our lab looking for car parts, and we’d say “No, no, no, that’s next door.” Meanwhile they had a clean room and all sorts of stuff. We did some great work down there. We went to JPL for the actual encounter, but most of the time we were working down there. About the time I joined their group they actually jumped ship and became part of the Lunar Lab, even though they didn’t actually move anyplace.

So that was Lyle’s Garage, from NOAO to the University of Southern California to the Lunar and Planetary Lab, all without moving more than half a dozen miles. I must say Lyle had a very successful operation. He knew what he needed and he got it. They did wonderful science on each of the four planets. I was privileged to be a part of that for the second view of the planets.

Almost everything we know about Uranus and Neptune was discovered by Voyager in those two encounters. And the Voyagers are still cranking along; Lyle’s instrument still works. It’s still actually collecting data, and useful data at that, about the interstellar gas outside of our solar system.

John Spencer

There were no planetary spacecraft launched during the entire period that I was in graduate school [1980 to 1987]. There were no Mars missions operating at that time except the tail end of the Viking mission. Voyager had been launched earlier, in ’77, and we had these encounters with Saturn and Uranus and Neptune—well, Saturn and Uranus—during my time at LPL. But no new launches, no immediate prospects of new launches except Galileo, whose launch ended up being delayed until 1989 by the Challenger disaster. It was really a dry time there. We did the best we could with the data we had, and there was more work being done, I think, with telescopes back then because there was still so much that was unexplored by spacecraft.

Jonathan Lunine

When I came here in ’84 there were a couple of things that were just actually getting going in terms of spacecraft projects and interesting programs. One was a comet-asteroid rendezvous flyby mission, which ultimately would be cancelled, but several people were getting involved in proposing for that. Cassini was just getting going. Voyager was winding down.

Gene Levy had tried to position the lab to really try to get some very big scores, if you will, in building instruments for the next wave of planetary missions. This was an effort to, in a way, transform the lab into a place that would build spacecraft instruments and ultimately, when NASA started the Discovery program, to actually be in charge of missions.

I could see that growth when I was here, the big proposals starting to be written; the efforts to secure new buildings and new space, which came to fruition in 1993. It was really a growth time. The sense that one had at that time was that things were beginning to open up, possibilities were opening up that would allow the laboratory to build on its previous expertise in observations and analysis—telescopic observations and analysis of meteorites—and move in new directions. And I think it has.

Gene Levy

One of my motivations in becoming the Director in the early 1980s—I had programmatic aspirations for the Laboratory, one of which was to carve out a major place for LPL in spacecraft experimental work. I think that’s been an extraordinary success. I’m really thrilled at the fact that that trajectory has gone forward unabated and in an accelerating way.

I was delighted also by the growing reputation of the Department in the University in terms of its footprint in undergraduate education, which I thought would set the stage for moving through the late 1980s and into the 1990s. I think another big success of the Department was the success of the Space Grant program, which I started in 1988, I guess it was, ‘88-‘89. That has been a great program, and I think has also contributed both to the prominence and success of the Department and the Laboratory. 

Dolores Hill

We’re vitally important to all solar system exploration, as well as some astronomical research. We have been and continue to be involved in essentially every space mission that there is. Ground-based solar system work had been based here for a very long time. The very first lunar atlas was made by LPL people. The SPACEWATCH® camera was the first asteroid survey anywhere in the world and it’s so successful that others sprang up, and the Catalina Sky Survey that was originally started as an undergraduate project has blossomed into a whole research group.

Jay Melosh

What keeps me here in Arizona is the quality of the graduate students. I don’t know any other department in the United States or even abroad that has this quality of students. The students are by and large a likable bunch of people who work hard, and a lot of the research initiatives are actually possible because of the graduate students.

The field trips started in ’84. Throughout my career I have always led field trips. When I came here I found, talking to Laurel Wilkening, that there was actually a line item in the budget for field trips. Gerard Kuiper was an avid field tripper, and as part of the LPL budget, he had a substantial amount of money every year for field trips, which had not been used since he died.

Now, his style was very different than mine. His field trips were for the faculty, and the students were not invited. They would fly to Hawaii, or to Mexico. He was an advocate of field trips, even though students weren’t welcome.

I had a 180 degree view of that. I had always invited faculty on field trips, but very few actually participated. The trips are basically run by the students. I generally pick out an area where a large number of students want to go, something they’re interested in, and they always change. In the 26 years I’ve been here, there have been no repeats. Sometimes we go to the same area, but it’s always different.

The way I arrange it is we decide on some kind of main topic. The main thing is that we go to see terrestrial features that have a planetary analog. We always have to talk about the planetary connections. When you look at something on the Earth, what are you learning about some process that occurs on a distant planet, and can you tell us about that? Unfortunately we can’t take field trips to the Moon and Mars, at least not yet, so we have to do the best we can on Earth.

Typically I’ll have maybe, oh, between 20 to 30 students along, sometimes spouses, sometimes staff people and so on. But the main thing everybody has to do is everybody has to choose a topic and give a talk on that topic. Spouses are welcome but they have to give a talk. In recent years I’ve brought my own spouse along a couple of times, and she has to live by the same rules: She gives a talk. It doesn’t always have to be about science; we’ve had good talks from people in history, or archeologists, or botanists or whatever. But everybody has to participate in that sense.

We’ve been making field trip handouts since about 1992. This little handbook is basically compiled by everybody who has a topic, and we choose the topics before we go, something of some geologic interest. Each student prepares a couple of pages on their topic, and they’re expected to give a talk, between 20 minutes and 30 minutes, on this topic.

The whole collection now is almost half a shelf, which covers most of geology and planetary science. If you wanted to learn about this stuff, you could do worse than looking through the field trip guides.

I usually help the students along by making most of the central topics. Some people will volunteer topics, and other people will take one of the central topics and go off from that. Each topic is usually associated with a stop. We’ll go to some appropriate place and the person gives their talk. Some topics don’t have particular stops and we’ll have fireside chat talks—after dinner people will give their talks.

We used to have a fellow from the naval ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] come with us for a couple of years. We went on a field trip with volcanoes, and he volunteered to give a fireside chat on his experiences as Commander of the Subic naval base in the Philippines. He was Commander during the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, so he talked about what it was like to be right underneath a volcano. He said one thing to learn was: Don’t fly jet planes through volcanic eruptions; that was a bad idea.

The students here have extremely good morale. I think the field trips help with that. Every semester they go out for three to five days—that’s the duration of these trips—and sometimes we get into trouble, we get a little stuck, we have break-downs, we have things that go wrong. At night we usually gather around the fire—we do primitive camping, we don’t stay in hotels. We go out, we take our own water and food and camping gear and stuff, and find someplace far away from the road and just sit down and camp.

After dinner we have our fireside chats. Believe or not, the students actually encourage these things. After dinner they’ll be questions: “Well, what about the fireside chat? Let’s have the talk!” Then afterwards people will sit around, they’ll talk—almost always there’s a telescope brought along. There are a couple of guitars usually. The students really seem to bond. I think the field trips help with that.

Harold Larson

Most faculty don’t have the time to analyze their own data, so they take on grad students. If they’re like me, we assign our grad students tasks that we couldn’t do ourselves. We figure, well, if you’re good enough you’ll find two or three years away that you know how do this. Grad students are often challenged to take on tasks that might look impossible, or might require the development of additional resources, collaborations with computer program developers, things that we wouldn’t have time to do. Having grad students around is crucial, and that’s why the Department was formed.

But now there’s the idea that, well, we also have an obligation to the public at large, to educate non-scientists, to help do something to alleviate the literacy problem. The undergraduate education has become progressively more important. It’s why we specialize now in teaching general education. It’s a way of giving back to the public in these classrooms something—helping non-scientists not only appreciate science but use scientific thinking, critical thinking to help them develop academically for their own careers. A lot of students don’t get it, but this is what we’re trying to do, to use science as a vehicle to help non-majors become better students and to appreciate science and eventually become supporters of science.

Steve Larson

The Planetary Sciences department has produced a lot of the current big names now, scattered all over. Most people look at LPL and Planetary Sciences as kind of a juggernaut. You go to a meeting now and you count all the people who came out of this Department, it’s quite amazing. And they’re all doing great work. Most of them are involved in flight projects in one way or another.

Dolores Hill

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with all the different people here. They’re very supportive and helpful, and we learn from each other, which is very important. I’ve also especially enjoyed working with students. It has been very gratifying over the years to see them go on to important positions, important work, and it’s always fun to be at a conference or see a documentary on TV and say, “Hey, I know that person!” I think one testament to the nurturing atmosphere we have here at LPL and how wonderful it is, is that many LPL graduate students and staff return after going to other places.

Dante Lauretta

Teaching greatly enhances your ability to do research, I think, because it makes you think about topics that are well outside of your research area, and therefore you get new ideas on how to combine what you are doing with other things people are doing.

My classes stay very current. When you’re teaching planetary science, the data come in almost as fast as you can tell the students about it, especially Mars and Saturn right now, so I’m always keeping up to date with what those missions are doing, what their big science results are, and passing that onto my students. It makes me a much better researcher, to be able to teach.

Plus, I always pick out the most motivated students and usually offer them a job in my lab, so I get undergraduates into the laboratory setting, and they get a lot of great work done. Dani Della-Giustina is doing an incredible study on using asteroids to protect humans on their way to Mars. She just won a nine thousand dollar NASA prize for that concept.

So I tap the undergraduate workforce as much as I can. They’re relatively cheap labor, and they’re really motivated, and they’re really bright kids. We’ve got some really smart people at this university, and I try to find them. I usually get one or two students to switch over to a science major from a NATS class every semester.

Picking out those bright undergraduate students and really turning them on to planetary science and seeing the light in their eyes when they get excited about a project is really a cool feeling.

Dolores Hill

We have a lot of visitors who think they might have a meteorite. I had one fellow waiting for me before I came in the door one morning, and he had 60 rocks. Sixty! I went through each and every one. But I used it as an educational experience and he was very appreciative, and after that session he knew what not to pick up.

I don’t normally get that many all in one bunch, but that has been something that’s a very pleasant part of my job, very gratifying. I’ve met so many wonderful people that way, and some of them do come back with real meteorites. It’s really a wonderful public service that I enjoy. People in Tucson are so excited about planetary science. It’s wonderful. They really appreciate all the things we do here. It’s fun to be able to share it with them.

Joe Giacalone

When I first got here, everybody was on this side of the [Kuiper] Building. This is the old side of the building. The atrium and the lecture halls and the catwalk in the back and all of that—when I first came, that had been built but it hadn’t been occupied yet. It actually still had plastic; you couldn’t go through.

I shared an office with Ann Sprague for about three months or so, and then we all moved over there to the new side of the building. That happened in ’93. Then we got the Sonett Building, and then there’s the Phoenix Building. So now we have three buildings and the number of employees has gone way up. It’s a much bigger operation that when I first came. In that sense, the lab has evolved.

Dante Lauretta

Teaching greatly enhances your ability to do research, I think, because it makes you think about topics that are well outside of your research area, and therefore you get new ideas on how to combine what you are doing with other things people are doing.

My classes stay very current. When you’re teaching planetary science, the data come in almost as fast as you can tell the students about it, especially Mars and Saturn right now, so I’m always keeping up to date with what those missions are doing, what their big science results are, and passing that onto my students. It makes me a much better researcher, to be able to teach.

Plus, I always pick out the most motivated students and usually offer them a job in my lab, so I get undergraduates into the laboratory setting, and they get a lot of great work done. Dani Della-Giustina is doing an incredible study on using asteroids to protect humans on their way to Mars. She just won a nine thousand dollar NASA prize for that concept.

So I tap the undergraduate workforce as much as I can. They’re relatively cheap labor, and they’re really motivated, and they’re really bright kids. We’ve got some really smart people at this university, and I try to find them. I usually get one or two students to switch over to a science major from a NATS class every semester.

Picking out those bright undergraduate students and really turning them on to planetary science and seeing the light in their eyes when they get excited about a project is really a cool feeling.

Dolores Hill

We have a lot of visitors who think they might have a meteorite. I had one fellow waiting for me before I came in the door one morning, and he had 60 rocks. Sixty! I went through each and every one. But I used it as an educational experience and he was very appreciative, and after that session he knew what not to pick up.

I don’t normally get that many all in one bunch, but that has been something that’s a very pleasant part of my job, very gratifying. I’ve met so many wonderful people that way, and some of them do come back with real meteorites. It’s really a wonderful public service that I enjoy. People in Tucson are so excited about planetary science. It’s wonderful. They really appreciate all the things we do here. It’s fun to be able to share it with them.

Joe Giacalone

When I first got here, everybody was on this side of the [Kuiper] Building. This is the old side of the building. The atrium and the lecture halls and the catwalk in the back and all of that—when I first came, that had been built but it hadn’t been occupied yet. It actually still had plastic; you couldn’t go through.

I shared an office with Ann Sprague for about three months or so, and then we all moved over there to the new side of the building. That happened in ’93. Then we got the Sonett Building, and then there’s the Phoenix Building. So now we have three buildings and the number of employees has gone way up. It’s a much bigger operation that when I first came. In that sense, the lab has evolved.

Guy Consolmagno

About 1976, so I’d been a student for a year, I was sharing an apartment, a little dumpy house on a road that’s not there anymore, much less the apartment house is not there anymore—I was sharing it with another student named Bob Howell, who’s the fourth one who came in my year. It was a miserable place. It was up by Grant and Alvernon.

Of course we would ride our bicycles in the morning because none of us could afford cars or anything like that. It’s cold riding your bike that far when it’s January in Tucson. We heard about one of the other guys who was looking for a place to live, and had found a house that was close to campus, on Hawthorne Street near Country Club. Only it had five rooms. It was the only way that any of us could afford to live in it—we were making 300 dollars a month. That was our entire stipend that we had to live off of and pay rent. So rent was like 90 dollars a month; that was a third of your stipend. But if we could find four other guys to move in, we could rent the place. This was the origin of Hawthorne House.

Hawthorne House was an institution among graduate students from’76 until about three years ago. Because after each of us graduated, someone else would move in, and it was a regular house for grad students in the Lunar Lab. I was one of the originals, Bob Howell was one of the originals, I believe John Wacker was one of the originals, Mike Feierberg, and I want to say Bruce Wilking.

Then Bob Howell decided to move out because it was too close to campus, and he wanted to bicycle. Bob was a biking fanatic. Sundays he would get on his bike, bike to Kitt Peak, bike up the mountain, visit whoever was observing that he knew that day, and bike home. 108 miles. That was his Sunday entertainment. After Bob moved out, I believe this was when Nick Gautier moved in, so that was the core of Hawthorne House.

William Bottke

I just found out that someone has bought the house and put it on sale for 900 thousand. If that house gets 900 thousand I’m going to be very sorry, because there’s no way that house is worth that much. The house had five rooms, maybe 1,900 square feet or so, and just a backyard of dirt. That became the house where four or five grad students stayed, and because there was a concentration of grad students, the parties would always migrate there. It always gave people someplace to go when they didn’t want to go home.

We always had people bouncing around the house for one reason or another. Some people have a hard time living in a house with a lot of other people, so there will always be some turnover. I can honestly say I’ve lived with a fair fraction of the field.

Paul Geissler

The first thing that happened when I got to LPL was the graduate students all took me in. They were very protective and sharing and open with one another, and they formed a gang. Typically we would do a lot of things together, especially as I continued on, but even right away they took me under their wing. Individuals would ask me out for lunch. The interesting thing was they had a map of the world up on the wall, and they told me to stick in a pin in the place that I called home.

I said, “Is this where I’m born?”

They said, “No, the place you call home.” So I stuck it right in Tasmania, which is the area in Australia that I spent most of my time, and I’m still very fond of. There were pins from all over the world. That made it easy too.

John Spencer

For a while we were having dinners in the evening on a regular basis, mid-week—I forget what day—when we might have the inhabitants of Hawthorne House and then another three or four outside people would also come. Or we would just spontaneously say, “Oh, let’s make spaghetti this evening” and then we’d all head over there on a Saturday evening.

There was always something going on. Sometimes it was just a couple people watching TV, drinking a beer in the evening. It was a great place to be social. It was always a mess, as you can imagine, with five graduate students living there. No one was ever sure who was supposed to wash the dishes or clean the floor or anything. Some people kind of recoiled when they came in the door. We got used to it.

Guy Consolmagno

One of the things that we did as grad students was that we had Journal Club once a week—either a regular, some professor giving a talk or a couple of students giving talks, and they’d have cookies and milk and tea and that sort of thing. It all came from the University and it was all dreadful. Plastic cookies.

We went to the Department Head and said, “You know, we’ve all got apartments. We could cook, we’ll take turns. If you’d pay us we could make the cookies.” They agreed to that, and we did it for one semester, and then they were told that the University would only pay the University for food; you couldn’t get it from an outside vendor. So the grad students couldn’t get paid for this.

We wanted to figure out a way of making money so we could continue to pay for the cookies. John Grady and Cliff Stoll, who were two of the students at the time, had decided that they wanted to get T-shirts printed that had the emblem of the Lunar Lab. I remember I wrote the Latin inscription on the bottom, which was supposed to mean, “Out of the solar nebula, planets.” Four words. I got the Latin grammar wrong on three of the four words.

When they went to get the T-shirts printed, they saw the guy who had this company printing T-shirts, and he showed them how they did everything, and they said to themselves, “We could do that.” So we started our own T-shirt printing company. We called it “Nocturnal Aviation” because it was a real fly-by-night company. We got the contract from Kitt Peak to print the T-shirts that would be sold at the gift shop—because, you know, somebody knew somebody who, that’s how all these things are done—and we printed the T-shirts in the backyard of Hawthorne House.

About that time, I think it was Nick Gautier who was trying to get some lab equipment and just wrote off to a couple of companies that might have what he was looking for—you know, “We’re trying to get equipment for our lab”—and people started shipping him surplus lab equipment; two-year-old terminals. At one point, word came down: “There’s three boxes and a thing on wheels!” I forget what the three boxes were; they may have been old terminals. But the thing on wheels was about the size of a telephone booth, on wheels, that was a high-energy, high-electricity, high-voltage source that you could use for vaporizing aluminum. I don’t know what happened to it, if they ever used it or not.

But they started just writing to everybody. Part of it was they said, “We will print T-shirts for cool stuff.” Texas Instruments wrote back saying that they would send them four sets of all the chips you need to make a mini-computer—unassembled of course, you’d have to design and build the circuits yourself—in exchange for five thousand T-shirts. An enormous number! They would pay for the T-shirts; we had to do the printing. Just endless printing of T-shirts in the backyard.

But they got the free terminal and this free set of chips. This was 1976, years before mini-computers or micro-computers, Apple or IBM, and they were building their own computers, literally on pieces of wood that we set up on the kitchen table at Hawthorne House. 

Nicholas Schneider

The summer of ’79, I was new. Gordy Bjoraker and Bill Merline had been there a year, a year and a half. We were saying, “Boy, we miss the old country”—meaning Wisconsin, where all three of us were from—and we said, “I wonder if you can get good bratwurst in this city?” So we shopped around, tried a few places, found out that you could, and we decided we’d have to share this gourmet delicacy with all of our friends. We jokingly called it the first annual Bratfest. The first one came off as a reasonably small event, but obviously it has taken on a life of its own.

William Merline

Gordy was there one semester before me, and I showed up mid-year, and Nick showed up the next fall. It was that first semester of the school year, the ’79-80 school year. We all got together over at the Big A, which I don’t think is even there anymore. We were grumbling because we couldn’t find any bratwurst anywhere. All three of us were from Wisconsin, and bratwurst and Bratfests were common in Wisconsin. We couldn’t find any at the store to buy. Of course now you can buy them anywhere. I don’t think we’re necessarily responsible for that, but you never know.

William Bottke

One of the big highlights of the year was what we call the Bratfest. When I found myself living in the grad student house, I didn’t realize that all of the sudden you became one of the major organizers for a serious party.

In general we’d get 120 pounds of bratwurst. We would bake the night before about 20 cheesecakes. We’d get lots of corn on the cob. We’d get many kegs of beer. This would be an all-day, all-night party. We usually had on the order of between 150 and 200 people coming. This is all in the backyard of this grad student house. It was amazing.

It started off small—there were some misplaced Wisconsinites, Nick Schneider and Bill Merline, that decided they wanted to have their Oktoberfest party here in Tucson, and they named it the Bratfest. Year by year it got a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, and then it turned into this gargantuan proportion at some point, because everyone had so much fun they kept coming back and the crowds kept getting bigger.

There was always a major fear that we were going to lose money on this thing. Every now and then we would come close. It would always be about two weeks out of my life getting ready for it, but it was so much fun. All the faculty would come. The party, of course, would pretty much go till dawn. By morning it would pretty much clear out except for the people that couldn’t move anymore.

I still have a lot of the Bratfest T-shirts. I have a lot of fond memories from that. It’s sort of a rite of passage for all the students; you go through this and then you remember it and you want to keep doing it. The students who have done it so far, as far as I can see, have done a good job of carrying on the traditions. My theory is that some of these traditions are going to drop off, but somehow they keep going year after year. We’ll see what happens. Maybe we’ll have Bratfest 100 Year, when I’m an old guy.

Paul Geissler

Hawthorne House was already a fixture by the time I got there in 1986. It was rented initially by some folks from the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Michigan, around there. When October came around they wanted to have their Oktoberfest. That’s how the Bratfest started. Originally it was brats and corn and beer and cheesecakes, and it was to relieve the homesickness of the Midwesterners.

I visited there frequently. Of course, I knew lots of people who lived there, and it was a place where you could always drop in. We were there for every party and every social occasion. There was one notorious Bratfest where they had a booth where you could dunk your favorite professor. You would toss bean bags and if you got it just right, there was a dunking chair, so your favorite professor would get dunked. That was a breakdown of protocol and status. Certain professors, Jay Melosh in particular, made a lot of money that way.

We had that beautiful mural of Saturn, a Voyager picture, that was blown up to the size of an entire wall. I’m sure it was the only picture that wasn’t destroyed—I mean, it was a museum-quality picture.

There were probably a lot of romances that took place. We had all these graduate students who did nothing but study, so they don’t have the opportunity to meet anybody else but another graduate student. If you ask me, it’s the very worst form of inbreeding, but it happens.

Nicholas Schneider

There was a party called Bacchanal, and one of themes there was bizarre-flavored daiquiris. Usually it was Bill Merline in charge of the blender. One of them was fish-and-chips daiquiri; snow-pea-and-onion daiquiri. For years people would try to top it.

The other tradition that was very strong and really helped build up a sense of camaraderie were the graduate student skits. Mark Sykes was a key player in those in our years. We would do things not only to amuse but also to inform. Sometimes we had to let certain faculty members know that their behavior didn’t meet the standards for one reason or other, personal or professional, so we would put that right into the skit. Sometimes we were reprimanded for doing it, but it didn’t necessarily change what we did.

Guy Consolmagno

We would have a Christmas party every year, usually at the Director’s residence. The first year we wrote a little skit among the graduates for the Christmas party, and that started a tradition which as far as I know continues, what, thirty-odd years: Student plays making fun of the faculty, in what we hoped was a gentle way.

Mark Sykes

We had these Christmas skits that had some national notoriety, in fact, because they were not very respectful. For instance, one was a Christmas Pageant—the Annunciation, the traveling to Bethlehem, the giving birth to the Savior and all that, except I played the Blessed Virgin. Different students portrayed different faculty members playing different characters, so I played the part of chairman, who was Laurel Wilkening. Then the Three Wise Men following the star, and I gave birth to the savior of planetary science, who we then crucified. That’s the kind of stuff that we did.

It was a long tradition in the graduate student population. When I was there, usually we had me writing things, and when Faith Vilas finally broke down into hysterical laughter, we’d say, “Okay, now we’re getting there.”

William Bottke

One of the other big things we did here is that every winter we had the Christmas party. The students would always do Christmas skits, and they’d do skits about the faculty. Then we started to videotape some of the skits.

The faculty looked forward to them; everybody looked forward to them. A lot of times we would have to write these things a day or two before the Christmas skits. We’d stay up all night trying to come up with something that would be funny. But somehow we always pulled it off. A lot of my memories go back to these Christmas skits and some of the things we did. Almost all the faculty members were a great sport. If we asked them to do something, they’d be a part of it. Sometimes it would be a great embarrassment to them as well, but they always went through with it.

I think that was another thing that helped bind everybody together: The faculty members, while being very good, did not take themselves too seriously. It made things more of a family feeling here.

Humberto Campins

One of the things that I thought was absolutely delightful was the irreverent group of students that I encountered when I first got to LPL, and their Christmas skits. I quickly became involved in those, and I had a great time. When I left as a post-doc, at the University of Maryland, I tried to instigate a similar type of activity among the graduate students there, and they were terrified. They wouldn’t dare do that.

So that was definitely very pleasant. Oh, I have so many stories. One of them that comes to mind is a time when a colleague, Nick Gautier—somebody was stealing cookies from his cookie can in his office, down on the first floor of LPL. He decided that he needed to catch whoever this person was, so he set up a video camera that was rigged to the light, and whenever somebody turned on the light in his office, this video camera would start.

He eventually did catch the culprit, but in addition to the culprit, all of these interesting characters started to show up in his office. The first one was the Cookie Monster. Somebody dressed as the Cookie Monster came and went through his desk, found the cookies, tasted them and said, “Oh, these are no good,” and he had a bag of cookies, and he added cookies to Nick’s can.

This went on. So it was the Cookie Monster, the Munchkin, the Thug, the Unknown Scholar, the Flasher. All of these characters would come in the middle of the night. Then Nick put a clock right next to the wall so the camera would pick up when this was happening. However, these characters picked up on that, and they would move the clock, or come in and not turn on the light and then change the time, so things did not happen in sequence. Even though this was sequential on the videotape, the hours were all wrong.

We would gather in his office every morning to find out who the characters were. I remember that we were joking about who each character was and nobody knew. They figured out eventually that the Cookie Monster was George Rieke. I was the Flasher. George said something about how I didn’t fool anybody; the moment I walked in they knew who I was, and I didn’t have them fooled for a moment, but he had them fooled for about two days or something.

I said, “Yeah, George, but if we could only figure out who the Unknown Scholar is.” The Unknown Scholar came in dressed in a cap and gown, and he was reading Icarus. He would read Icarus and eat the cookies and all of these things.

It must have been two or three weeks that I let it go, and then I said, “George, how long was it that you had them fooled?”

He said, “Oh, like three days.”

Then I said, “Okay, I want to tell you, it’s been about three weeks. I was the Unknown Scholar.”

Anyway, Frank Low, who was Nick’s boss, would come and shoo us away from the monitor every day, because we would all gather there to see what happened the night before. Frank Low would say, “Oh, you guys are wasting time, you’ve got to work! Work!” He would come by and we would all scatter. Then as soon as Frank was gone we would all come back to watch what was going on. That went on for about two weeks, and it was a very memorable time. It had nothing to do with science, but it had to do with the camaraderie that we all had during that time.

Paul Geissler

We originally didn’t have that big extension to the building. We just had the front part of the [Kuiper] Building. We were really cramped. It was way too small of a space. They had great parking in the back, though. But it was small compensation, because the offices were tiny and nobody had an office to themselves.

Behind the Business Office is now a little lecture hall. That space was occupied by maybe 20 graduate students. It was called the ghetto. That one space had these little tiny cubicles put into it, and the individual space would be about as big as a table. Typically there were two of us to a cubicle, and the doors were decorated with all kinds of outrageous stuff; clippings and preprints and cartoons. All kinds of stuff—just what people were working on or were interested in, pictures of their motorcycle or their kids or whatever.

So that was the ghetto. That forged some solidarity among the graduate students, because you’re literally on top of each other. I moved from there to a little tiny closet that Mike Nolan and I shared. It was no bigger than one of these little tiny cubicles, and we literally couldn’t swing a cat, but what was funny about it was we couldn’t both put our chairs back at the same time.

Mark Sykes

The graduate students back then lived in a ghetto behind the main office. There was an absorption tube that ran the length of the building at the time that Uwe Fink would do experiments with, measuring absorption lines of gases. They’d put gases in there and bounce light back and forth over a huge path length, and then see how much of it was absorbed in different wavelengths.

This tube ran right through the graduate student ghetto, so those of us who had an office on the outside wall of the building would have the tube going through it, like a shelf in our office. I put up curtains and a bed, and it was pretty cool.

We were a pretty close-knit bunch back then. When I came in they were also something of an older group. As a consequence we didn’t respect authority a whole lot. We gave the poor faculty a bit of a hard time through our tenure.

That was also the era of magic keys, where all the graduate students would file keys down so you could open all the doors in the building. It was kind of a rite of passage. Everybody would always deny it.

Nicholas Schneider

One of the fun projects that I was involved in, and contributed to the delay of my graduation, was we build a prototype Mars rover called the Mars Ball. There was an idea that a French scientist had had about how to make a rover that had squishy wheels. Each sector of a wheel could be inflated and deflated, and if you had a flat part of the wheel on the bottom you could sort of fall forwards by deflating one sector and then raise up in back by moving the air there. It sounded like a really cool approach to roving on Mars, where something could be big and dumb; just roll over these obstacles.

We built the prototype of this. At one point we thought it was going to be 16 feet tall. That slid over sideways, so we made it six or eight feet tall. It was a very challenging project: We were there with sewing machines, sewing bags, and buying blowers. We got a NASA grant for it. In the end we were able to show that this device would work. We took it to a Mars conference in Washington D.C. where it rolled around and climbed over obstacles.

But the idea was hinged on the idea that you wanted to send something to Mars that was big and dumb. The lesson that I’ve adhered to ever since then is never bet against the computer, because small and smart has turned out, as you can tell from the current rovers, to be the way to go. But it was a fun project. Most of the students were involved and had different roles. I did the computers; other people did the blowers or the fabric of the wheels. It was fun to do something that was so different from the other work.

John Spencer

Other things that started in my tenure were Jay Melosh’s field geology trips. I have very good memories of the first of those, where we went up to the Flagstaff area and got to hike down into Meteor Crater. I remember seeing impact melt, real impact melt, there on the crater wall and being very excited about that. That was in the spring of ’85. I guess those have continued since then. So that was a fine tradition to get going.

We had star parties sometimes. There were a lot of people who were interested in astronomy on an amateur level as well as on a professional level, and we’d borrow the Celestron 14”s that we used for occultation work, and we’d take them up to Mt. Hopkins and camp out overnight and see the sights of the sky out there. That was another highlight.

There was the Friday evenings at the Big A. I don’t know if the Big A is still there, but that was a little bar up on Speedway and Campbell where Brad Smith and Mike Drake and whatever grad students felt like going along would spend the last couple hours of the day, every Friday evening there. That was a nice start to our Friday evening socializing.

William Bottke

Once every few months we’d have a field trip to some region of Arizona. There are all sorts of great memories from that. Everyone loved the field trips. The Pinacates in Mexico was a standard trip. Jay Melosh was the professor that taught us. He taught a planetary surfaces class, and planetary geophysics. But he thought it was important to get the students out of this Department and get them out in the field. There are a lot of things you just can’t teach by sitting in a classroom. I think all of my friends agree that we probably learned more on those field trips than we ever learned in class.

Jay would have assignments where every student would have to prepare a presentation for some stop you’d make along the road, so it would be some mountain or some feature or some fault you’d have to describe. Then you’d have to give handouts to everyone, and then for 15, 20 minutes you’d have to lead the discussion on what was interesting about that feature. Then we’d drive on to the next place.

So we went to the Pinacates in Mexico; we also went to Meteor Crater and also some other things up in near Flagstaff. We did other field trips to a lot of different other places: White Sands, New Mexico; Canyonlands; we went to southwest California where you have a number of playas, dry lakes, and the Blackhawk Landslide.

Almost everything that one could drive to, we went to, over the course of five or six years. We always got big turnouts, because they were fun. You had to actually do science, but on the other hand, you would see a lot of things, and then night would come, you’d break out the beer and sit around the campfire and everyone just had a great time.

Guy Consolmagno

A professor who was here at the time, Laurel Wilkening, had organized a trip for us to go to see Meteor Crater, and actually get a tour of the crater, with a professor who was an expert in meteor craters. The idea was, we would go up, camp out in Oak Creek Canyon, and the next day go up to Meteor Crater. Well, Cliff Stoll and Bob Howell, who were both big bicyclists, decided that the thing they would do was actually bicycle to Oak Creek Canyon. They took off a week early, and of course it’s hard to find roads that aren’t freeways that connect parts of the state. They rode back roads, all the way from here to Flagstaff.

The day before they were supposed to arrive—we were going to all meet in this camp in Oak Creek Canyon—it snowed. It snowed in Flagstaff, and they cancelled the tour. But there was no way we could get in touch with these two guys. So all the other students looked at each other and said, “What the heck, let’s go up there anyway.” So we drove up just to meet these guys and rescue them, and camped out overnight and drove back down to Tucson. But that’s the only time I’ve heard of anybody bicycling to Flagstaff.

John Spencer

We had this wonderful trip up to the Grand Canyon in February 1981. About seven or eight of us headed up there in a couple of cars, and we had CB radio going up I-17 toward the Grand Canyon, and listening to each other’s favorite music very loud on the tape deck. Just that great feeling of camaraderie—I think it was the first time in my life that I felt surrounded by like minds, people who really understood and enjoyed the same kinds of things that I did.

Guy Consolmagno

The other big thing, of course, the big cultural shift that occurred which changed everything, changed everybody’s life, was the movie Star Wars. After the movie came out, for about a year there was endless discussion of everything in that film, how they did it—It was just the only thing that people could talk about. We went and saw it I think about eighteen times. Because we didn’t have VCRs in those times, so the only way you could go and see it was to go to the movie theater.

The movie came out in the summer of ’77. In the fall of ’77, NASA was going to test the first mock-up of the shuttle. Not by launching it, because of course the shuttle lands without any power, and NASA had built a 747 that could carry the shuttle on top of it, which I guess they still use. What they were going to do was fly the shuttle on top of the 747, release it, and then just let it fall to Earth and see if you could actually land the thing. Somebody said it was like flying a brick. They were going to land it at Edwards Air Force Base.

On the spur of the moment, Nick Gautier—who was not actually a LPL student, he was a Steward student, but he hung out with us because he was doing infrared astronomy—Nick, and John Wacker, and it might have been Bob Howell I want to say—hopped into a car, probably John’s green Volvo, and drove from Tucson to Edwards Air Force Base in time to see the shuttle land, which was called the shuttle Enterprise. It never flew, it was just the mock-up. Then [they] continued from there into Los Angeles, which had one of the three theaters in the world that was showing Star Wars in 70 millimeters. Somebody knew someone that they could crash on the floor of. That was the kind of stuff that we’d do as grad students. I have a feeling that grad students today are doing equally crazy things.

Nicholas Schneider

When I was applying for graduate school, my astronomy advisors—because there were no planetary advisors—said, “Nick, you’re giving in to the Dark Side,” a term which was two or three years old. I’m very proud of it, and I feel very lucky that the timing worked out to realize that this was the wave of future. But clearly there were very few places in the world where you could do planetary science. The fact that there was a whole building for it was pretty astonishing to me.

William Bottke

Being in Arizona, you’re at a hub. You’re in the middle of where everybody comes to you eventually. When you go to conferences, you see all your friends, like a class reunion every six months. It’s almost inevitable that at every conference we’ll get together and start reminiscing.

I’m getting more involved with missions. More and more—you’d think you’d get away from it—you start seeing these people that you grew up with now being at the same level as you, also being involved in the same missions, and you realize: Why is it that all the Arizona people are here? You start to wonder, is it just because you have so many friends that ultimately you’re going to be paired with them, or is it just that they did a good job teaching us, so we’re all still in the field? I think it’s some combination of the two. There were good people and good education and it all worked together.

Dale Cruikshank

The people that come out of LPL are very well-trained, and they’re dynamic, vigorous researchers. They’re just great. It’s a tremendous resource for all of planetary science to have the quality and breadth of the young people coming out of the Lunar Lab program.

William Merline

All these different disciplines seemed to come together and work well together without any prejudice against each other, and that was really probably the most surprising thing that I found. There didn’t seem to be any bias against people who wanted do astronomy for their thesis verses geology or physics or anything else. That really helped contribute to the environment there.

Nicholas Schneider

It really felt like this was where planetary science was happening. It was pretty clear that there were very few places at that time that deeply into planetary science. The field was young; it was broad; we didn’t really know what we were going to see as we went out into the solar system. It seemed like Arizona just had all these experts in all these different areas. It was just a wonderful time to see all those opportunities.

I hope that you can reconstruct the pay that graduate students earned verses year, because it’ll make you laugh to hear how grateful we all were for this level of support. The people in the year before me—I think it might’ve been measured in the hundreds of dollars per month, or a thousand dollars per month or something like that. It was really pitiful, and several of them I believe were on food stamps, and you just buy the Brand X macaroni and cheese. Nonetheless, we were delighted to have it, and it went up rapidly thereafter. It became a very good life as a graduate student, and some would say we got too comfortable as graduate students. My particular story is that for a while I held the record for the longest time at LPL as a graduate student—eight and a half years. Bill Merline doubled my record. For a while I was very concerned that he drive safely and cross the street carefully so that he would successfully graduate and I wouldn’t hold the record anymore.

William Bottke

I really think here in Arizona there was a special rapport between the students and the faculty. We had a really good group of students; we really cared about one another, we liked to have fun together and do things together, and the faculty tried to encourage that.

Also, we took on a lot of traditions that had been passed down through the years by the older grad students. I think that helped the connections a bit. A few faculty would come out to beers with us from time to time, and they also went to field trips and everything else. So I always felt closeness to them. In my later grad student years I heard a complaint through the grapevine that grad students were too happy, so they never want to leave. There was some truth to that. We were having so much fun. You’re not getting paid much money, but you don’t have any responsibility except your science.

In some ways you have extreme freedom: You’re young, you can do what you want, you can work in the science you want, you don’t have to worry about writing proposals to bring in the bills or anything else, and we all enjoyed one another. We enjoyed the place. We just had a great time. It probably did take us a year or two longer to get out because we were having too much fun.

Guy Consolmagno

There was tremendous pressure being a grad student. The pressure was mostly in ourselves; we pushed ourselves harder than any faculty could. But you could get overwhelmed by it, and sometimes for relief the best thing would be when we were invited to go talk to grade school kids. Then you could show the pictures and then you remembered why you were doing this in the first place.

Nicholas Schneider 

When I was a student, there was a tradition [when you graduated] that would you take your nametag—they were all made in a particular form; they were exactly the same size and same font—and you would transfer it to a certain bulletin board. We were not the first generation of students there, but to realize that you were part of this—it was like manning a ship. We knew that we were building the field of planetary science, and that list now is probably ten times longer than when I was there. I don’t know how long that tradition lasted or if anybody’s taken a photo of it. It was the great ritual: Pulling my nametag off the door and putting it on the list of PhD’s from this Department.

Mark Sykes

We all had these little cardboard nametags that were taped to our doors. When you went to the ghetto, there was a corkboard up there. The door tags of every person who got their degree were put up on this board. When I arrived there was half a dozen or so people up there. By the time I left, of course, there was more. Everybody who got their PhD would put their name up there, and it went back to the very first graduate of the Department, Wayne Slattery.

Unfortunately when they got rid of the ghetto, it disappeared. There’s no memorial, if you will, to all the people who have gone through that Department. And the Department’s generated a lot of people in the profession over the years.

Lyn Doose

We had the Pioneer 10 encounter with Jupiter in December of ’73. It was the first spacecraft to get out to Jupiter, and I was part of the team that commanded the spacecraft and analyzed the data; looked at both the uplink and downlink. It was really neat. We got to sit at Mission Control up at Ames Research Center, and we’d monitor the commands to make sure they went out to the spacecraft. It wasn’t like today when you have these vast computer memories on spacecraft. Basically the instrument couldn’t remember anything but what it was told last, so we’d have to send commands out, and there were tens of thousands of commands, and everything was on IBM punch-cards. It was a different time.

On Pioneer we worked in teams. We had one guy monitoring the commands that went out and another guy monitoring the commands that came back, and occasionally radiation would affect the instrument and it would go wandering off doing something entirely different from what it was supposed to do. We had to have the uplink guy, the guy sending the commands, take corrective actions. But the light-time was an hour and a half so we’d lose an hour and half of observations whenever that happened.

Then Pioneer 11 got there a year later in December of ’74 and both missions were big successes. I was working on the red spot and I actually programmed up the sequence to take photos of the red spot. The photo that resulted from that line-up got on the cover of Scientific American, so that was gratifying.

Pioneer 11, which sling-shotted its way around Jupiter, went on out to Saturn. It finally arrived at Saturn in ’79, so the seventies was just this long sequence of planetary encounters. Really great stuff, really gratifying, and for somebody who just got his degree, it was just fabulous. We saw the F-ring on Saturn for the first time. Nobody had ever gotten ground-based pictures that looked like that, at that time. It was just very exciting.

Martin Tomasko

For the Pioneer encounters, these fly-bys of Jupiter, we had a series of maybe 20 thousand commands that we had to write and figure out where to point the telescope and how to make the pictures. The spacecraft was a spinning spacecraft, so there was a little one-inch telescope where the angle from the axis of the spacecraft could be varied—could be stepped—in half-millimeter steps. As the spacecraft rotated, it would sweep out one line of photometry across Jupiter, and then you would step the telescope half a millimeter, and then scan out a second line and scan out a third line, and this way build up an image over a period of an hour or two, with scan lines one after another.

Not only that, but the round-trip light time to Jupiter is like an hour in a half, so you have to transmit the command 45 minutes before you want it to take effect, and then 45 minutes later you can check off that it actually got there and took effect and the telescope is doing what you told it. The other thing about it was that Jupiter has powerful radiation belts, trapped energetic particles, and these would whack the instrument. Commanding the instrument was kind of like telling an old, senile guy to go to the store and get a quart of milk. You tell him, “Go to the store and get a quart of milk,” and he starts marching off, moving in the direction you want. He knows he’s going to the store and he’s getting his quart of milk. About halfway through the images: “Where am I going? What do I want to do?” It would reset the registers when the energetic particles hit the instrument, so the instrument would start moving the way you wanted, and then halfway through, it would just forget its mind. It would just go off doing something else completely different.

We had a crew of guys around the clock, three shifts of guys, checking off this list 20 thousand commands as each one got transmitted, and the other guy with a downlink book, checking off that, yeah, the spacecraft did that, it took effect. Then finding: No, that command didn’t take effect, and in fact, that instrument is off doing something else. But that’s what it was doing 45 minutes ago, and in the meantime you sent an hour and a half of commands to the instrument to do something different, so it’s now going to be starting at the wrong place, and those are going to be bad. So now you have to figure out: What commands do we have to insert in the sequence to get back on the track and put the instrument back in and reconfigure it to do what we want it to do?

It was actually a major effort. One of my first jobs here was to figure out how to generate this command sequence, and then train the guys who were going to monitor the uplink and the downlink, and make sure we actually got some pictures from Jupiter in the process. It was really a heck of a challenge, and a very different flavor than today. Today you write a command sequence and it gets loaded into the computer and it goes zip, and it’s up there, and inserted into the machine, and it does what it’s supposed to do. It was quite a different flavor.

The first flyby of Jupiter had an imaging device on it. The instrument did spin-scan imaging. But of course all the while that it’s building up an image, it’s getting closer and closer to Jupiter. So the image is not like a snapshot that you take, but it’s accumulated over an hour and a half, and it’s got ferocious geometrical distortion.

To make it look like a picture, there was a whole other set of processing that had to be done. There was no Internet, so this data was collected at Ames Research Center, and put on tapes. The tapes were flown back to the University of Arizona, and they went through some complicated geometrical rectification step, then flown back to California, and then they could be displayed and people could see the pictures.

They were beautiful, and some of them were really quite spectacular. But you have to understand that Jupiter is a fairly bright object. The limitation of the kind of imaging you get with a ground-based telescope is the scintillation of the atmosphere. The atmosphere has turbulence and refracts the image, and doesn’t make a very sharp image. But if you take thousands of images, you can find instances when the atmosphere is fairly still, and you can get occasionally very good images of a bright planet like Jupiter from a ground-based telescope.

The images we got were better than the best ground-based images, but not by such an enormous knock-your-socks off factor. The main advantage was that we flew around Jupiter, and Jupiter’s far away from the Sun compared to the Earth, so we only see Jupiter essentially illuminated face-on. But the spacecraft flew around and could look at Jupiter as a crescent, at ninety degrees phase, and we could observe Jupiter in all these different new geometries that we’d never seen before, and we could learn something about the nature of the cloud particles by flying around and looking at it from other directions.

Lyle Broadfoot

We did Mariner 10 while I was out at Kitt Peak. That one went to Venus and then to Mercury. We went around the planet, and then around the Sun to shoot back to Mercury. Orbiting Mercury, we always came back to the same place at the same time. The last time we passed, we ran out of gas. The control is done by gas jets.

They actually flew it around the Sun the last time using the solar panels to stabilize it, because they knew they were going to run out of gas. So they used the solar panels to fly it like a sailboat. Then as they approached Mercury, they turned on the gas jets and stabilized it, and we did our experiments until the power passed. 

Robert Strom

I got involved during the Apollo program in Mariner 10, which was the first flight to Mercury. That was a reconnaissance flight to just see what was on Mercury, and to plan for an orbiter. It wasn’t supposed to be a definitive mission; reconnaissance was all it was. That was a successful mission.

Nobody’s ever been back to Mercury since 1975. I was on the planning committee to send an orbiter there. It never happened, for two reasons. One, people looked at Mercury and said, “Oh, well, it’s just like the Moon, so it’s not interesting.” Which is baloney, but that was the perception at the time. The other reasons is, to send a mission to orbit Mercury is an extremely difficult task, and extremely expensive. They haven’t been to Mercury until recently [with the MESSENGER mission].

Alan Binder

I was a Principal Investigator on the lander camera team. The first landing of Viking 1 was early in the morning, about seven o’clock. This was prime time for the morning shows. Our team was divided into two parts; uplink, which was choosing the pictures, laying out the sequences, getting the computer programs written so we could get the pictures we need; and then the downlink guys. I was head of uplink.

We were very busy, as you might imagine. It took in those days two weeks to develop the load to go up to the spacecraft. So we had to pre-program for two weeks, without even knowing what the surface was going to look like, the sequences. I had to see those pictures immediately to begin to modify for two weeks ahead.

So I was eagerly waiting to in my area to get these first pictures, and Tim Mutch came in and he said, “Hey, MBC wants somebody for the Today Show, and I want you to do it.”

I said, “I’ve got plenty to do.”

He said, “Come on, this is important.”

So I had to go over to that TV place. We had successfully landed; we knew we were down. The first thing that happened was our number two camera was supposed to come up—it was a slow-scan camera. Nothing like what you see now where the pictures just come down, boom, boom, boom. It was a facsimile camera, so it did one scan at a time in the vertical and slowly it would rotate.

My God, this panorama began to come in front of me, and there were rocks all over the place, and I didn’t know what to say. I was just dumbfounded by the beauty. The camera guy kept saying, “Dr. Binder, say something!” and I would say something and I would look at these pictures. That was just exciting—not that I was on TV but that first picture from the surface of Mars was just unbelievable. Those were the good old days.

Victor Baker

We had a lot of data from the Viking mission. I was a guest investigator on the orbiter imaging team for the Viking mission, so I was studying this from the point of view of a geomorphologist and a geologist. This was leading to a lot of ideas about what it might be that had operated in the past on Mars to create the conditions that allowed flowing water, and particularly rather condensed flows of water in the form of these giant floods that made the Martian outflow channels.

As a geomorphologist I’m interested in the surface form and processes that operate on a planet. Images are absolutely essential to interpreting that. But of course the images that were initially just a visual range of perception have now been augmented by images that are showing us spectral properties. For example, with Venus we had images that were showing us radar reflectances. These are all images, but they may not be as easily interpreted by the general public as a regular picture-type image.

I find immense scientific value in them, and it’s quite a long story as to how that works. One would have to understand how it is that we do science with images. But a brief statement of that is that the images relate to a larger context, the features of interest. We see them in relationship to other features in a sort of spatial relationship that has to do with their causes and their overall pattern.

So as geomorphologists we use that understanding to get further understanding on how the planet works, and particularly the surface of the planet. We combine that with other information, of course, but images—that’s essential.

Science is not an individual activity where we do things that just inform ourselves. Science is a community activity, because that community is what validates or thinks about the relationships of what we have discovered to what other scientists have discovered. So I benefit from seeing what they do; they benefit from seeing what I do, and it’s all part of an endless quest for the truth of things.

No one is going to be critical of you even if you make a mistake. If you’re similarly dedicated to that process and you’re honestly engaged in doing it, you’re all part of the same spirit of investigation. Even though you might be using somewhat different tools and methods and even somewhat different ways of thinking about things, you all come together in a common spirit of searching for just how it is remarkable things like the surfaces of planets came to be the way they are. 

Martin Tomasko I proposed for a Venus entry probe mission, Pioneer Venus, and we got selected and we built a photometer to measure the penetration of sunlight through the atmosphere of Venus as the probe comes down in a parachute through the atmosphere of Venus. How thick are the clouds? How much sunlight gets absorbed in the clouds? How much gets absorbed down to the ground and can drive the greenhouse effect that would be responsible for the high temperature on the surface of Venus?

We found something like two and a half percent of the sunlight makes it through the clouds and gets absorbed at the ground, and that’s enough, we think, with a thick thermal blanket in Venus’ atmosphere, to explain the greenhouse effect.

But it was interesting, too, proposing for that mission, getting selected, working with an aerospace contractor to built the electronics. The optics was designed here, actually in Optical Sciences Center. The sensor head was built in the Optical Sciences Center; it was calibrated here in Tucson, and then delivered and flown. We finally got to answer the questions ten years later that we proposed in the original proposal of how much sunlight gets absorbed in Venus’s atmosphere. That was really exciting, too.

Lyn Doose

Marty Tomasko was my thesis advisor. We got a contract to do Pioneer Venus, which came along in ’78. It was an entry probe. We had an instrument on Pioneer Venus called the solar flux radiometer, and it parachuted down into Venus’s atmosphere and it got down to about, I don’t know, 20 kilometers or so, when apparently the solder melted, and it quit working; it got too hot. But we built that here largely, we did all the testing of it here, and I had a lot of experience in building and flying instruments by that time.

Peter Smith

I had worked with Marty Tomasko when I was a student. After graduation, he hired me to help calibrate an instrument that he was sending to Venus. I worked for two or three months helping him calibrate this instrument. It was delivered to the spacecraft team in June, the launch was in August and it landed on Venus in December. A month later we had a paper in Science magazine. A few months after that I was writing programs for the thermal balance of the Venusian atmosphere, and thought of myself as a Venusian weatherman. This is great, what a wonderful career, exploring planets.

Bill Sandel

There were two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched about a month apart in 1977. They visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. For Jupiter, both encounters were in 1979. The spacecraft were spaced out by that time, so there was a Saturn encounter in 1980 for Voyager 1 and 1981 for Voyager 2.

At the Saturn encounter, Voyager 1 was targeted to go very close to Titan. The close approach to Titan required a trajectory that took it out of the ecliptic plane, so it wasn’t possible to retarget that for any more planets. But Voyager 2 didn’t have that restriction, based on its trajectory. So it was possible to keep it in the ecliptic plane after the Saturn encounter, which was the end of the nominal Voyager mission, and it continued on to Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989.

Lyle Broadfoot

With Voyager we made several discoveries along the way. We discovered the Io plasma torus, which occupied our time as we came in to Jupiter. We had a slit instrument with 128 detectors that were scanning across Jupiter, so if there was anything going on we might pick it up. What we found was the torus, and the torus is out at about five Jupiter radii. The source of the torus is Io, the satellite.

As we came in we saw this ultraviolet emission around the planet. If we hadn’t had an ultraviolet experiment we wouldn’t have a clue and wouldn’t know it was there today. So that was a big boon for our program.

We were looking across and we saw this thing and we modeled it as we approached. Now the particles and fields instruments are in situ instruments; you have to pass through the atmosphere in order to make the measurements. We were lucky on Voyager, saying, “Hey, you guys, there’s some high energy particles in orbit around Jupiter.” We went on telling them this as we came in, and finally I guess we had them convinced. We were flying close to Io, and a couple of the instruments were saturated and we had to turn down the gain, based on our measurements, because we told them what the density was and all this.

I, as the PI, had a dream one night. I told those guys that Io was volcanic. Unfortunately, we decided not to bring this up, because we thought it would be more trouble. There were a couple of theoreticians, and I think the problem was they couldn’t see how to get material off the satellite and into the atmosphere.

After we got by and I actually had come home, and was settling down here, I got a call from one of our team members at JPL. He said, “Guess what? Imaging has seen plumes, volcanic plumes, on Io.”

It took five or six days to fly by Jupiter because it’s such a big planet, so there was stuff going on every day. Every day there was a press conference, and each of the experimenters would present whatever they had seen the previous day. It was a lot of work. No sooner did we get through a press conference than we started having to figure out what to say the next day. Then we sent that off to the drafters and all that to get the artwork done. Yeah, it was a busy time.

Jay Holberg

There were two Voyager Ultraviolet Spectrometers, one on each spacecraft. By the time Lyle Broadfoot’s group joined LPL, the Voyager had passed Jupiter and Saturn, and we were headed for Uranus in 1985 and Neptune in 1989. It was a very, very busy time.

My involvement with the instrument was that I was the person who did the scheduling of the observations that were made, and was responsible for helping with people at the Jet Propulsion Lab to design the observations, making sure they went smoothly at the planets.

One of the principal things I did was I was responsible for using the instruments during the cruise, between Uranus and Neptune and so forth. In that respect I found that the instruments were extremely useful for ultraviolet astronomy. Since that was kind of my background, I used those instruments to make lots of observations of stars and the interstellar medium and so forth.

The instruments were designed and used for observations of the planets, but those observations occurred during a very brief period of time during the encounters, and you had all of this time in between. Those instruments were extremely valuable in helping to understand a part of the spectrum, the extreme ultraviolet and the far ultraviolet, that wasn’t being addressed by NASA at that time.

One of the biggest highs was when we were approaching Saturn, and they were taking all these pictures of the rings of Saturn and so forth. You could see all this structure in the rings. There were these papers that predicted the structure, or portions of the structure, has to do with the orbital resonances of the moons.

I was intrigued by this because I sat in a meeting and listened to these people talk about this. But no one really knew the scale of these pictures, so you couldn’t say, “Ah, that resonance there is due to that moon over there.” I knew nothing about planetary rings, but I had worked to get our instrument to watch a star go behind Saturn, and you could actually see the star through the rings. You see the light drop out and come back and drop out and come back. It’s called occultation.

That observation was the primary observation of another instrument on the spacecraft, but I realized that we could use our instrument just as well. So I got the observation designed so we were included in the observation. I got the data back and I was very intrigued by it—all this structure—so I just sat down with a pencil and piece of paper, and I knew what the trajectory was, and I worked out where everything should be. All of the sudden it all fell into place, because there were predictions of where these things should be. You could see just about every prediction lined up with one of these features.

Lyle Broadfoot

We got a program going under NASA, which was under the rocket program. It was an ultraviolet telescope [UVSTAR, the Ultraviolet Spectrograph Telescope for Astronomical Research]. We observed short of 1200 angstroms, and that region is—there’s no transparent optics. So it’s an issue of building fairly specialized instrumentation.

In that case, we were looking a little bit at the atmosphere but mostly we were looking at planets from the shuttle. In particular we were trying to image Jupiter, and get the signature actually of the torus. That worked pretty well. That was a good mission. We were up seven times—seven shuttle missions. The last one was in ’98. We flew all our instrumentation—we flew two telescopes and the GLO [Arizona Airglow] Instrument. And we flew John Glenn.

That was the last mission because other things were going on that kind of precluded us looking at the ultraviolet on planets. The Galileo mission was approaching Jupiter, so they were going to take over from anything we had figured out. We would be in the Goddard Spacecraft Center just outside of Washington, in what we called POCC, Payload Operations Control Center. Once the shuttle got up, they would open the bay doors and they would start it up. We had ground control of the instrument. The only thing the astronauts did for us was to turn the power on, up until they closed the doors. The last two or three flights, we actually had three instruments up at the same time, the GLO, the UVSTAR, and Starlight.

Martin Tomasko

The Galileo experience was quite interesting. I wanted to propose an entry probe instrument for Galileo much like the Pioneer Venus instrument that would enter Jupiter’s atmosphere. When they announced the opportunity for Galileo, they said it was going into the daytime side, and we could study sunlight and the deposition of solar energy and do the same kind of thing for Jupiter as we did for Venus.

While they were reviewing the proposals, they decided they were going to change the trajectory and it was actually going to go to the night side. So we didn’t get selected, because we were working in sunlight, not with thermal radiation. But then about six months later they changed, and decided they were going to go to the daylight side anyway. So we were invited to submit the modifications of our proposal.

We submitted the modification and they said it had high scientific merit, and was really great, and they invited me to give a pitch to other co-investigators that they’d selected six months earlier for the mission. I gave my pitch, told them about my instrument, how big it would be and what it would measure. They asked the other investigators who thought this was a good instrument. They all raised their hands. Then the guy said, “Maybe I didn’t put that question quite right. We’ve already selected these guys and we’ve parceled out all the money. Who thinks that this instrument is so good that they’re willing to resign, get kicked off, so we can have room for Tomasko to fly his instrument?”

I was really annoyed. I thought, “If that’s the ground rules, why did you bother inviting me to do all this work? I just worked for months on this new revision of this proposal, and then you tell me that the only way you can add me is if one of these guys, who’s been working just as hard on his instrument, has to volunteer to resign?” That’s a hopeless situation.

Of course I didn’t get selected, but a guy got selected who had a thermal radiation experiment, analogous to my solar radiation experiment. That guy, in the meantime, had died. His instrument was given to another guy from Wisconsin by the name of Larry Sromovsky. I knew Sromovsky pretty well, and Sromovsky invited me to be a part of his thermal experiment, and to help calibrate his instrument.

The Galileo launch was delayed substantially because of the accident with the astronauts, the fact that Challenger blew up, and so Galileo kept getting postponed and postponed and postponed, and I was able to work with Sromovsky to a fair extent to save this thermal experiment, which had some problems; to make it work for the Jupiter entry probe.

So that was an exciting time, too. That instrument was a very difficult instrument. It measured thermal radiation and returned one number, but it turned out that that instrument was sensitive to all kinds of things. It was sensitive to the electrical charge; it was sensitive to humidity; it was sensitive to temperature and pressure. The joke was, it was a complete weather station, but it only gave you one number back. Sromovsky worked very hard to improve that instrument, and actually got some useful data out of it, but it was really only because it had been delayed so long.

Richard Greenberg

The reason I got on the Galileo imaging team was because I made the case that the orbits and the spin of the satellites of Jupiter might play a role in determining what they look like, and that we might actually be able to use imaging to tell some things about how they rotated and stuff. I was the person on the team who understood dynamics. The other people who were interested in satellites were more geologists.

I had really brilliant students working with me. Randy Tufts was actually a student in Geosciences, but you know, no one cared. Greg Hoppa was a Planetary Sciences student. Paul Geissler was a former Planetary Sciences student. There were several other people who participated in the Europa stuff: Dave O’Brien, Terry Hurford. One other person who was important in all this was Alyssa Sarid. Alyssa was a Space Grant undergraduate intern who was assigned to work with me. She had some major breakthroughs in Europa work as well.

What was interesting was when the images came down the geologists used their expertise to try to interpret what they saw, to a large extent using qualitative analogies with the kinds of geological features that they were used to interpreting.

Our group had a much more quantitative approach. Randy Tufts brought expertise in geology, but we in general had a much more quantitative approach to interpreting the geology than most of the other team members, because I came from this orbital dynamics background.

What we looked at was the tides on Europa. Tides actually distort the shape of the body periodically. It causes heating—and that’s why there’s an ocean on Europa, because there’s enough heat to keep most of it melted—and it also, because it’s distorting abruptly the whole body, it stresses the ice on the surface so there’s cracks, and it also affects the rotation, and it affects the orbit. The tides are really important.

We were able to explain some very distinctive crack patterns on Europa in terms of the tides. In fact, our explanation of a certain kind of crack pattern called cycloids was the first evidence that really said, “There is liquid water there.” It was later corroborated by studies with a magnetometer that measured effects of Europa’s presence in Jupiter’s magnetic field and confirmed that there was a salty or conductive layer—a salty ocean. We just really were able to explain huge amounts of that. That was pretty exciting.

William Boynton

The Mars Observer mission was interesting in the sense that the instrument that I was the leader of—it was called the gamma ray spectrometer, but we weren’t building it. This was what’s called a facility instrument. For a facility instrument, NASA takes responsibility for building the instrument and the design, and the science team which I was leading was just responsible for running the instrument and collecting the data and publishing the results.

The people who were building the instrument, Lockheed-Martin—at that time it was just called Martin-Marietta, in Denver, but it’s the same group that’s building the Phoenix Lander. We got a good instrument out of it. Now, when that mission failed, NASA decided to—first they were thinking of just rebuilding the mission, rebuilding the Mars Observer Spacecraft. In the previous era—like in the Voyager days, or the Viking days—NASA always built two spacecraft, just with the idea that something might go wrong with one, and if you have two you’re better off.

Well, in this case NASA was trying to save money, so they built all of the parts for two spacecraft but they only built one spacecraft, with the idea that if something went wrong then, two years later, we could put all of these parts together and fly it again. In fact, that’s kind of what everybody was thinking would happen, and they had some plans for how to rebuild it.

Everyone thought that was going to happen but there was a new NASA administrator named Dan Goldin, and he came up with this idea of “faster, cheaper, better,” and he was saying, “Well, rather than sending one big spacecraft to Mars, let’s send three little ones and we can do that for a lot less money.”

Not many people believed him. I remember we had a big meeting on the subject of people who were involved in the Mars Observer mission, and virtually everybody thought what made sense was to rebuild the spacecraft as they originally intended and fly it to Mars two years later. In the end I have to give him a lot of credit, because in the past we were going to Mars once every ten or twenty years, and with this new plan, for a while we were actually sending two spacecraft to Mars at every opportunity, and we’ve now gone back to just one. But you actually can do a lot with several little spacecrafts, and one of the big advantages was that you can learn something on one mission and then have a chance, four years later, to take what you’ve learned and build some new instruments to sort of capitalize on questions that might have come up with the earlier mission. So that worked out pretty well.

I actually remember when the Mars Observer mission failed. The spacecraft just stopped communicating. It went into a maneuver, it was going to do a certain observation, and it never came back.

For a while people were thinking, well, it has different safe modes that it’ll go into, and eventually it will figure out what’s wrong and it will start talking back to Earth. Those kinds of things happen. People were used to the idea that sometimes spacecraft have problems, and very often can figure out what’s wrong for themselves, maybe with some help from the ground, but they at least can reestablish communication.

For two or three days we kept hoping it would phone home. But it never did. I suspect it’s like when somebody is missing in action in a war, and you never really know if they’re dead or if they’re going to be found. It was one of these things that, after a while we finally had to realize this thing’s not coming back.

We had planned a big celebration here for after we arrived, and we had already arranged for the catering service and everything, and I remember Gene Levy, who was the Department Head, said, “Well, I guess maybe we ought to cancel that party.”

I said, “Well, how about if we do this?” I realized a lot of the people in the Department were, you know, kind of nervous and didn’t really know what to say to me if they saw me. Some would say, “I’m so sorry, Bill,” and some really wouldn’t know what to say, and some people would wonder what happened.

I said, “Why don’t we actually have an event where I’ll spend a half hour to an hour talking about the mission and what it was supposed to do, and what we know or don’t know about why it failed.” There are some upbeat things too, in the fact that one of the reasons we do these missions is to train new students and scientists and engineers, and that happened. Those people are still going out into the field even though the data doesn’t come back, people who were involved in building the instruments and calibrating them and building the spacecraft—they’ve all learned, and helped develop that technology.

So we did that, and it was kind of like a wake. I think it worked out very well, and people got to understand what was going on, and we kind of got to the point where we could say, “We’ve actually buried this dead spacecraft and now we’ll go on with the next mission.”

Fortunately I had another mission in the wings so I could work on that and didn’t have to spend all my time moping around. But these missions do take a lot of time, and you go some years without very many publications betting on the outcome, that you’ll get these wonderful data back that’ll make up for three or four lean years without very much in the way of publications. Having two in a row that failed, and another one, the [NEAR-Shoemaker] comet penetrator, that was cancelled, it was looking pretty bad. But fortunately Mars Odyssey came through and just made up for it.

William Boynton

For the NEAR Shoemaker mission—NEAR stood for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous—I didn’t build the instrument, but we worked with the John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. So it was APL rather than JPL. They actually built a very nice spacecraft and when the mission was all over, they decided rather than just abandoning the spacecraft they would actually let it touch down on the surface of the asteroid even though it wasn’t really designed to do this. But there was so little gravity on the asteroid, which is kind of a small body, that they got away with doing this.

Dan Goldin, the head of NASA, was actually very nervous and didn’t want to say that they were landing for fear the public would get their hopes up too much, but they went ahead with it and it was very successful.

After they landed they weren’t sure really what to do, but they landed with enough sunlight that they could keep the solar panels in light where the spacecraft could work for a while. The evening that we found out that we had a successful landing, I said, “Hey, can we turn on the gamma ray spectrometer? Because we’ll get much better data being right on the surface than being well up in orbit, pretty far away from it.”

We had a meeting the next morning and everybody said, “Yeah, it’s worth a try, let’s try it.” So they turned the instrument on and in fact we got much better data back from being on the surface than we had in orbit. 

Peter Smith

In the midst of building the instrument for the Huygens probe, it became possible to propose for the next mission to Mars. There hadn’t been one in twenty years. I had a dream about transforming our Titan camera into a Mars camera. I sketched out some ideas and equations, and did some drawings, and ended up proposing for Pathfinder. We won that. We did our proposal in two weeks.

That changed my whole life. I had started in a temporary position 15 years earlier and now I was a Principal Investigator of a six million dollar project. We needed to design and build a camera; I quickly hired 30 people. It was a very strange time for me. I had to grow into this new life very quickly.

Timothy Swindle

In some ways, that camera, I think, is what brought back the Mars program. Pathfinder got there over the Fourth of July in ’97, and the cover of Time magazine the week before had been the upcoming big celebration at Roswell, New Mexico: The 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident.

Suddenly, the pictures came back from Pathfinder. I remember sitting in the auditorium downstairs at the celebration for LPL employees, and I had the family with me. We hadn’t signed up for the food—we were going to eat elsewhere—so we just went and sat in the auditorium, and all of the sudden here come these pictures from the surface of Mars, just flashing across the screen. No commentary or anything, but real-time photos from the surface of Mars.

That was just so cool, and apparently other people thought so too, because while Roswell had been the big news the week before, as soon as those pictures hit you never heard anything more about Roswell. Pathfinder was the top of the news. If it had been a very successful spacecraft with instruments that had made a lot of good measurements, but no camera, that would not have been true. I have to say that I think that camera might have been the biggest success; the imager from Mars Pathfinder. 

Lonnie Hood

We had a new lunar mission called Lunar Prospector which was launched in 1998. There, finally, all that work that I’ve done on the Moon came back to be valuable again. I’ve been analyzing that since 1998.

I was one of seven scientists who were leading that mission primarily. Alan Binder was the primary person. I was involved with him over a period of ten years while he was trying to get something going to go back to the Moon. Usually he failed, but finally, very miraculously, he was able to get a Discovery mission for going to the Moon for a very low cost, only I think 60-something million dollars, which was a very tiny amount for a spacecraft.

It was a very successful mission overall. It was in orbit around the Moon for a year and a half. We’re still analyzing the data from that even now.

Alan Binder

We started Lunar Prospector as a private effort, outside of NASA. When I was working for Lockheed at the Johnson Space Science, several of us got together to try to do a lunar mission ourselves, since NASA had completely abandoned the Moon and was not interested in it.

We had many reasons for doing it. One of them was to show that you can do a mission commercially, even though ours wasn’t commercial. By commercial I mean very low cost, very reliable, and get good data. As Prospector proceeded—we got to the point of launch and it was successfully in orbit—I spent a lot of time going to Congress and other people, trying to say, “Look, we need a data purchasing program, we need to take these missions out of the hand of NASA.” 

My mission cost $65 million. Cassini cost I think two to three billion, and Galileo cost a billion. These are wonderful science missions, but the cost can be reduced by a factor of ten if you do it commercially. Everything NASA does cost ten times more than if you do it commercially. You know, 65 million dollars, that’s postage-stamp money.

If we are going to start to not only explore space but utilize space for the benefit of humanity, and utilize lunar resources for humanity and so on and so forth, it’s going to have to be done commercially. Therefore I applaud things like Spaceship 1, and a friend of mine who has bought the Kistler Rocket and built a space plane for commercial flights. These are the things that count.

I think the public can be engaged by the private sector. I had people calling me up asking if they could volunteer to work—sweep the floors, whatever. Of course they couldn’t because I was building the spacecraft at Lockheed. But there was that much of a connection between the public and what I was doing.

I did tours of the spacecraft as we were building it. I was Mission Director, and it only took two of us to run Prospector. It was a straightforward, simple spacecraft, which was my message. That’s the way I believe things should be done. I had people come in when I was doing orbital maintenance burns with the spacecraft, and they were thrilled. They could sit there and watch us running a spacecraft.

Bill Sandel

I’ve been spending most of my time since 1996—wow, ten years now—on a mission called IMAGE [Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration], which is another Earth-orbiting mission. IMAGE is a MIDEX mission, mid-sized explorer missions. IMAGE was the first one; it was a new concept. Jim Burch at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio is the mission’s Principal Investigator. The satellite and all the instruments on it are dedicated toward imaging the Earth’s magnetosphere in several different ways. It was a new concept, never been done before, so we’re in a position to really make some exciting new discoveries. And we did. It’s really been fun.

Our understanding has increased in big steps with each new mission. When you look with new eyes, you see new things. You can hardly avoid it. With IMAGE, boy, just coming to work everyday has been a real gift, because the plasmasphere changes all the time. It’s continually shrinking and expanding in response to forces from the outside, so you never know what it’s going to look like the next time you look.

Steve Larson, on the discovery of co-orbital satellites around Saturn

We were on the ground observing with the 61-inch telescope in the Catalinas, which was funded by NASA specifically for high-resolution imaging for the Moon and planets, as well as developing other instrumentation for infrared work.

After Kuiper had died, Brad Smith came over from New Mexico State University and he was Principal Investigator of the Voyager mission. He had been pushing for the application of charged-coupled device, CCD, cameras at the telescope. They were still very crude and under development, and they weren’t quite ready for flight time on spacecraft.

But we did get to use a prototype that had been developed for the Hubble Space Telescope, and observed Saturn during the 1980 ring plane crossing. It occurs roughly in 14-year intervals. If you’ve seen Saturn’s rings, they look tilted, but as the Earth goes around and Saturn goes around, they’ll be a period of time when we’re right in the plane, so the rings just look like a thin line. Because of that, there’s less light scattering, so we can look for inner moons and other phenomena that you wouldn’t normally see.

We were following up on what had been announced as the discovery of a satellite, based on data taken in 1966 with a 61-inch during a previous ring plane crossing. There was indication that there might be another satellite, very hard to see because it was faint. But we had looked at all the 1966 data and came to the conclusion that there was a new satellite orbiting very close to these rings.

Well, as it turned out Pioneer 11 flew by Saturn just about the same time we were observing it. Its camera was not capable of taking pictures nearby, because things were flying by so fast, but it sensed something that blocked some of the charged particle radiation that was in the magnetic field of Saturn. We didn’t know what it was at the time. Later it would establish that it was the wake of the satellite that we thought was there, and observed later in 1980. We were watching a satellite that we expected to see coming out of one side. It was called Janus.

And then we saw one on the other side come out.

It turned out, they had about the same orbital radius. This was the first existence, the circumstance of observing two satellites that were in essentially the same orbit. They’re called co-orbitals. We named the co-orbital Epimetheus.

It was a thrill to be at JPL during the Voyager encounter of Saturn. Because of our observations they had planned to make observations to include the satellite. Not only did they get Epimetheus, they got a series of pictures showing the shadow of the ring going across. It was neat to experience a world going from a little point of light to actually seeing it as a chunk with craters.

There’s still discoveries being made like that, with Cassini and whatnot, but those first were always unique experiences. Dynamists knew that such a co-orbital situation was possible but it had never been observed before. The orbits were just slightly different, but they were different by less than their radius. What happens is, as they go around, they revolve in the plane of one other satellite. The satellites will come close, but they’ll have mutual gravitational attraction, and they’ll pull each other, and one will be pulled into a lower orbit and one will be pulled into a higher orbit, and then it’ll go apart again, and they play this dance all over again. It hasn’t been conclusively determined how it got in that situation in the first place.

Robert McMillan, on the founding of SPACEWATCH®

I think about the spring of 1980, Tom Gehrels had written a draft of a proposal to look for asteroids that might hit the Earth. He gave it to me just to criticize: “What do you think of this?”

I wrote back what I think looking back now was probably a pretty stinging criticism of it, because I thought the way that he was going to do it simply wouldn’t work. And I said so. I gave the reasons why, thinking, “Well, that’s the end of my job.” But I didn’t want to lead him on; I thought there were some real problems with the initial approach.

Instead of firing me he said, “Well, why don’t you help me do this project, because I think I need you.” So to my astonishment he made me the deputy investigator on SPACEWATCH® and we wrote a proposal. I think the first proposal was in March of 1980.

SPACEWATCH® is an exploration of the whole solar system for asteroids and comets, with an emphasis on potentially hazardous asteroids that might hit the Earth. In addition to finding a number of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, PHAs, we’ve also discovered trans-Neptunian objects; we’ve discovered Centaurs that orbit in the outer solar system between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune; and many comets. We’ve done scientific investigations of the statistics of asteroids in the main belt, and statistics of the asteroids in the near-Earth object region.

Over the last 26 years, SPACEWATCH® has gone through a number of revolutionary phases in which we’ve had different kinds of technology and equipment. We’ve upgraded the telescopes from time to time; we built a new telescope so we now have two. We’re observing very intensively on Kitt Peak with both telescopes as I speak. We’re well-funded by NASA at least until spring of ’09. Indications are we’re going to continue to have a role in follow-up and discovery of asteroids, especially the ones that are possibly going to hit the Earth.

I’m quite proud of the accomplishments of SPACEWATCH®. We have a certain niche in the world effort that nobody else is doing. It’s of course very hard work, observing on Kitt Peak, long hours, sixteen hour days, or nights if you like, and we all have to put in about eight nights a month, two telescopes with one person, so it’s a real handful. I’m one of the three observers. And I’m the Principal Investigator as of June of 1997, when Tom handed off the PI-ship to me. But he’s still associated with the project, he still goes to the telescope, and he offers advice and so on. His international reputation is still associated with SPACEWATCH®; we benefit from that too.

I see SPACEWATCH® as my life’s work in more than one way. I helped to invent it, and I’m doing a lot of observing with it, of course I’m responsible for it, getting the funding and so on. I am collaborating with people at JPL who are developing a couple of instruments, spacecraft, to detect asteroids from space. The reason that SPACEWATCH® is relevant to that is that ground-based telescopes will be needed to follow up on discoveries that are made from spacecraft, and so the ground-based follow-up is an integral part of these new spacecraft missions.

I’ve steered SPACEWATCH® in the last several years over toward following up objects after they get too faint for the survey telescopes to follow them. That’s our niche, doing faint follow-up, and that is ideally suited to collaborating with spacecraft missions. So I think I have a pretty decent future, a certain niche in planetary science. We have actually the largest telescope in the world that is dedicated full-time to searching for asteroids and following them up.

William Hubbard, on the discovery of Larissa

The planet Neptune has been one of my lucky planets. Neptune’s first satellite, Triton, was discovered in the nineteenth century, and after that there was a long period with no further discoveries of Neptune satellites. That was partly because astronomical instrumentation just had not progressed to the point that you could discover new satellites around this very distant planet. Kuiper—I think it was in the late forties—discovered the next satellite of Neptune, Nereid, which is, it turns out to be, a member of a class of very eccentric, small satellites that are orbiting Neptune. That was one of Kuiper’s discoveries, and it was a nice curiosity.

In 1981 we set up what you’d call a coincidence experiment in the Catalinas, trying to actually look for Neptune’s rings. I was the Principal Investigator on that project. We set up two coincidence experiments. One was on the Catalina 61-inch, which is now known as the Kuiper Telescope. The other experiment was on the 40-inch up on the summit of Mt. Lemmon. The idea was to monitor stars that were passing behind Neptune to see if we could detect rings. We saw a drop-out in our signal on both telescopes, and when we analyzed it, we concluded that we discovered the previously undetected satellite of Neptune. It’s now known as Larissa. I thought it was kind of neat that we discovered the next satellite after Kuiper’s satellite, using Kuiper’s telescopes. In fact, Kuiper is now buried at the telescope where we discovered this.

It’s kind of like deep sea fishing. You have this long line out into space and you don’t know what you’re going to reel in. We pulled in some other interesting things over the years.

Jay Holberg, on ground-based observing

We’re very fortunate here in Arizona because we have four or five observatories. You go up and get ready to make your observations, and you pray for good weather. A couple of nights of bad weather can set you back six months. If you come back and ask for more time, you’re with everybody else, so it’s a bit of a roll of the dice.

But people generally know what to ask for and how much to ask for, and you have a reasonable chance of getting what you want. You go up there and sit in the warm room and look at a monitor, and find your star and make your observations and move on to the next one. You’re up there all night taking data, and you come back down and tell a graduate student to reduce it, and hopefully you find what you’re looking for.

Peter Smith, on searching for extra-solar planets

Space projects in the eighties were rarer than in the late seventies. To keep myself busy, I helped a group looking for planets around other stars. We built an instrument that was accurate down to three meters per second, which is six miles an hour. Imagine looking at the surface of a star watching it pulsing at six miles an hour or higher.

This was before the new LPL addition. We built the instrument on the ground floor near the loading dock. We took a telescope out to the parking lot, and tried measuring the velocity of stars with a 14-inch Celestron telescope using a fiber optic to pipe the light into our laboratory.

Of course we couldn’t see anything but the bright stars. So we looked at Arcturus. I spent two years putting this instrument together and I was really hopeful that we were going to see a steady value, maybe one that bounced around at three meters per second. Instead, the first night we averaged our data, we got a hundred meters per second. The second, it was zero. The next day, it was a hundred again. Very disappointing.

It turns out that Arcturus is not a stable star: It has random pulsations. Nobody knew that; this was the most sensitive stellar instrument ever built. We finally figured out the instrument was okay, but it threw us off our schedule. We took the instrument up to Kitt Peak, where we had a dedicated telescope shared with Tom Gehrels who was looking for near-Earth asteroids. We got the bright time, he got the dark time: We were looking at bright stars, and he was looking at faint asteroids.

We had to spend two weeks a month up there, when the Moon was up. We’d alternate months between me and Bob McMillan. You’d be up there at the 36-inch telescope all alone, nobody but you in this big dome of a building. We only observed in the winter so night lasted 14-hours. You’d set everything up and start your observing. At about four in the morning, you’d battle to stay awake. Every hour we’d shift the telescope to a new star.

We had a TV screen that had an image of the entrance slit to the instrument, and there was a little blurry dot, which was the star. There was a circle drawn on the screen, and you had to keep the blurry dot in the circle. Then there was a counter that had numbers on it telling you how much light entered the instrument. It was like the dullest video game you could imagine. You tried to keep those numbers maximized by pushing the telescope drive buttons. After ten hours of that, your eyes were just dripping, because everything else was dark except for these little red lights. All the red lights would start to swim around.

So to keep from falling face-first onto the table and passing out because it was so dull and boring and you were so tired, you’d walk up to the top of telescope—this was a big dome, maybe five stories high. There’s a little place at the top where, if you climb a series of ladders, you can climb out under the sky. You felt like a sailor in a crow’s nest on top of a tall mast.

You had to be careful on those stairs. There’s no railing on one side and it’s thirty feet down. I remember one time walking up all those stairs, trying to stay awake, at probably four in the morning, and Halley’s comet was visible, rising in the East. I was hanging on, half-conscious because I was so tired, and I felt like was on a ship. I could feel myself moving. I think the wind was blowing. It was amazing because the stars were so bright and beautiful that I tried to reach up and grab one. That’s the joy of astronomy, I think. You see those stars and of course wonder about them and you’ve got your instrument down there and you try to see if there’s a planet on that particular one.

Unfortunately we weren’t too lucky with our choice of targets. There were maybe fifty stars available bright enough for us to measure, and we could only do twenty. You’ve only got 14 hours in the night so you can’t do too many. None of the twenty we choose actually had a planet. It turned out later that the first planets they discovered had a four-day period: A four-day year. We would’ve seen those right away, even at night; I think it would’ve gone right off the charts. If we’d just chosen the right stars, we would have discovered planets back in the mid-eighties. But we didn’t. Now it turns out that for about for every hundred stars, one has a planet.

Dolores Hill, on the K/T boundary

I helped out with K/T boundary samples. That was very, very exciting work, mostly by Alan Hildebrand. He was a very serious fellow who was quiet and kind. He would travel all around the world to all of the known K/T boundary sites, and bring back either chunks of rock out of a cliff, or material that he had removed from a cliff, in these little baggies. He would go to places that are very humid, so he’d have to leave the baggies open to let the moisture out. He would separate those out into different strata, and actually analyzed those samples. He developed a radiochemistry technique to analyze the siderophile elements, which are the metal-loving elements.

Even though in the popular press [Luis] Alvarez gets an awful lot of credit for identifying that there was high iridium in that layer, Alan—and also later David Kring joined him with Bill Boynton as his advisor—was actually the one to pull together information from a lot of different perspectives, and a lot of different data, to identify the actual site of the crater. I don’t think people really understand the whole story there, because, like I said, he was kind of a quiet person. He doesn’t look for credit, but he deserves it.

He analyzed all these materials, and the thing that confused people for so long was that the chemical signature indicated both an ocean impact and a terrestrial impact. It didn’t make any sense. One camp would say, “Well, obviously the big impact hit in the ocean, and we have no hope of finding a crater,” and the other said, “No, there’s terrestrial signature, it had to have been on land, it’s here somewhere.” It kind of bounced back and forth, and each ignored one side of the data.

He carefully looked at it all while this confusion was going on. He would attend conferences and a couple times people would come up and say, “I have these core samples that are kind of funny. We think we saw some interesting material there.” He’d take these core samples and put them out on the table, and he looked at those and realized that what was previously identified as volcanic soils was in fact impact.

Another person from an oil company contacted him one time and said, “There’s this funny circular depression. You might be interested in that.” That turned out to be the crater [the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico]. It had hit half on the continental shelf and half in the ocean. Because of that, the material that was spread around the world had different signatures. So all these little bits of information he studied, magnetic anomalies, gravitational anomalies, just converged on this site. It was really fun, to see the whole process come together. His dissertation was exciting. It was just little bits of random information that came together.

Jay Melosh, on the SNC meteorites

When I came to the University of Arizona, a big problem had come up that I had been working on or considering. Round about that time, 1980, it was recognized that some very strange meteorites—the so-called SNC meteorites, shergottite, nakhlite, and chassigny—had come from a larger body. The proposal had been made that perhaps they came from Mars.

At that time, the best understanding of how impact craters worked said that there was no way to eject a rock at anything like Martian escape velocity and have it survive its flight. Gene Shoemaker said in no uncertain terms—I can still remember his voice echoing through the room—that it was absolutely impossible to get a rock off of Mars without it either melting or vaporizing. Yet these rocks had neither melted not vaporized, and it became more and more clear as 1980 turned to ’81, and ’81 to ’82, that they in fact really had come from Mars. ’83 was the clincher—dissolved atmospheric gases were found in one of the Martian meteorites that were an absolute dead-ringer for the Martian atmosphere. Basically all scientific resistance collapsed.

I was attracted to this problem where the best theory and the observations disagree, and started working on mechanisms by which the rocks could be ejected. In the end I recognized that it was the interaction of the shockwave in the rock with the surface of the planet that actually was responsible for ejecting the material into the upper atmosphere, a process I call spallation.

I worked on that pretty exclusively for the first couple of years I was here, 1982 to ’86 or so. I was working pretty hard on that mechanism by which rocks get ejected from their parent bodies. That’s now pretty much the accepted mechanism; we have a lot of direct observational evidence that that process is, in fact, what happens.

Dolores Hill, on meteorite research

The very first project was one where they had had some difficulties. It was to study compositions of individual chondrules and chondrule rims. We developed a technique that worked out very well I think. We would disaggregate or take apart meteorites and gently break the sample so that the chondrules would fall out, and then we tried to identify which ones might have a dark rim around it.

At that time it wasn’t known whether these were rims that had condensed onto the chondrule after it formed, or whether these just were particles that had been accreted onto the surface, or what. We wanted to find out. We would separate these chondrules and irradiate them. We’d send them to a nuclear reactor on campus at the University of Missouri, and when they came back, we would take the little chondrule and glue it to a push-pin, and grind it on a little piece of grinding paper. That would be our sample.

It was an ingenious technique—it wasn’t my idea—but the paper was not radioactive so it didn’t matter to us. We saw the sample that was deposited onto the paper. I would grind these little chondrules—they’re only about a millimeter, two millimeters across—on to a series of maybe four or five of these grinding papers, and then I would count those papers under gamma ray spectrometers. By looking at those we could tell what the outer layers of the chondrule were made out of. Then we popped the chondrules off of the push-pin and made little thin sections of them, and looked at them under an electron microscope.

At the same time, we were studying calcium-aluminumrich inclusions, otherwise known as CAIs. We made slices of this little thing on a special saw that we have, and then we broke off this rim area. We analyzed that through a radiochemistry technique that Bill Boynton developed to look for rare earth elements, a very critical group of elements. He pioneered that procedure.

We had a very famous person work with us as a post-doc, named David Wark. He’s since passed away. He actually studied the first rims on CAIs, and the rims are named after him: Wark-Lovering rims. He did several experiments that no one will ever repeat, because they were so difficult and tedious.

We were very privileged to work on the very first lunar meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica. It was called Allan Hills 81005. That was the first time we ever identified a lunar meteorite that had been ejected off of the Moon onto the Earth’s surface. We were able to do that because we had Apollo samples to compare it with. It was pretty exciting. We knew we should have these samples but we had never identified them. So that was a wonderful project, very exciting. 

That also then, I think, laid the groundwork for, again, being privileged to study another meteorite called Calcalong Creek, which is a lunar meteorite in Australia. That one was really famous for a long time because it was, at the time it was discovered, the only meteorite not found in Antarctica from the Moon. There’s no good reason why they’re only found in Antarctica, so it was exciting to finally spread out. Since then many more have been discovered in the Sahara Desert. There should be more in other places, we just haven’t found them. We’ve worked on Martian meteorites as well.

Jay Melosh, on the origin of the Moon

While I was here, the idea that the Moon had been born of a giant impact came up. It was suggested in a meeting around ’84, and soon there was serious talk about how the Moon was made. I got involved with that, actually in collaboration with Chuck Sonett. I didn’t go to the actual meeting. I had some responsibility to give a lecture at the Flandreau Planetarium on Martian meteorites, so I couldn’t go to the meeting on the origin of the Moon which took place in Hawaii. But a number of people came through here on the way back from that meeting, and I heard about the speculations.

I decided right then and there that all the speculations were flat wrong. The proposals that had been made were transparently incorrect. I figured I could spend a weekend and write up a paper to get rid of all this nonsense.

In the process of that weekend working—it actually took place mostly on an airplane, I was going to another meeting—I realized that there was a way out. What people were talking about was patently not going to work, because the people who were talking about this didn’t understand impacts very well, but there was a way in which impacts could launch enough material to form the Moon. Furthermore, in the process of launching it you would have to vaporize most of the material, and if you condense that material in a vacuum it would have the chemical signature that accounts for the difference between the Moon and the Earth.

I ended up writing a paper. Chuck Sonett was the co-author. We wrote up this paper in which we actually agreed with the impact origin, and described in detail how it could happen, and the chemistry. That was published in the book that contained the proceedings for the conference, even though I didn’t go to the conference.

Steve Larson, on comets Bennett and Halley

Laurel Wilkening came in with Mike Drake, at the same time, not long after grad school. She went on to become quite an administrator. She was on the International Halley Watch oversight committee. She knew that I was interested in comets, and she encouraged me to propose to participate.

One of my problems, if you will, is that I never got a PhD. I started taking classes in the department, and after taking six units a semester while still working full-time, I didn’t get great grades and I was basically told I didn’t have a future in planetary astronomy.

But I was carrying out this cometary physical characterization program, and so I took her advice and I sent in a proposal. I had done work also on comet Bennett. It showed some fantastic structure at the head of the comet, which I had seen in drawings before. I thought they were figments of someone’s imagination. There were spirals and all kinds of fantastic features, and the comets I had seen up to that point were just fuzzy things. But comet Bennett came along, and by God, there were these spirals. That just absolutely blew me away, and I said, “I’ve got to learn more about these.”

We had a conference on comets, and published a paper on the determining the rotation of the nucleus. It’s like a lawn sprinkler effect; you’re putting stuff out, but because you’re rotating it, it looks like a spiral. I thought that was pretty cool. I had been looking out for other comets that had those kinds of features, so I proposed to be involved in the so-called Near Nuclear Studies Network, which was one of the many subdivisions of the International Halley Watch that specialized in different techniques.

I won an award to be part of that. I was a deputy discipline specialist, is what they called it. That turned out to be another fantastic experience, because I met people from all over the world, did a lot of traveling, and set up this network where we were observing the comet constantly at different longitudes.

Because the work on modeling these jet features on Bennett, I was invited to be a guest investigator on the Soviet Vega spacecraft mission to comet Halley. That made me a member of the Inter-Agency Consultative Group which had been set up to coordinate all the investigations. Those were interesting times, as well. I’ll never forget going down to South Africa. I was able to obtain my very own CCD camera for the first time, to make observations of comet Halley. We had built it so it was portable, so we shipped it down to South Africa, because the comet was more visible down there, and at its brightest during the time of the spacecraft encounters.

I went down with a guy I had hired to actually do the observations, to set things up and start observing, but I had to fly to Moscow for the encounter. I had just sent a telegram to the guy saying, “I’ll be up there at such-and-such a time,” but I never got anything back. I had no idea where to go, who to contact. But they had arranged to have somebody meet me, so it was okay. I went back to Mission Control and observed the data coming back from that encounter, and then that was followed a few days later by going to Darmstadt in Germany where the European Giotto spacecraft flew by.

Lyle Broadfoot, on airglow experiments

About 1986 my group started to get involved with the U.S. Air Force. That’s when we started to build experiments for the shuttle. We did ground-based experiments as well at the AMOS [Air Force Maui Optical Station].

We didn’t do much ground-based other than this work we did with the Air Force. But it was still flight data—flight-based—because what we were doing was observing the shuttle as it flew over the optical station. With their instrumentation—and we had our instrumentation tied to theirs—we would observe the airglow emissions.

Airglow means that something is active in the atmosphere, like the aurora. The aurora occurs because electrons, protons, are trapped in the magnetic field, and they come into the atmosphere and they excite the upper atmosphere. The emission changes as a function of altitude, and by observing the optical emissions we can say something about the density of the atmosphere at that moment.

What we were doing with the shuttle was they were firing their thrusters, and they were turning their thrusters to the ram direction to point their thrusters forward and fire them, and we were observing them to see what the interaction of the thrusters with the atmosphere was. So this is airglow. We had the shuttle do different configurations and fire jets in different directions, and we looked to see if we could see a signature that would be useful.

Of course, this was all before the Berlin Wall came down. Once the Cold War was over, that program started to slow down. At that time what we were trying to do is get signatures that would allow us to identify types of rockets and stuff that might fly over from some unknown location in the Soviet Union. So that work kind of slowed down. But we continued to do airglow.

The advantage to us working with them was that the experiments we did working for the Air Force only took two or three days—or probably just one day, because there’s not too much going on. The rest of the time—because we were usually up for seven to ten days—we used our instruments to look at different airglows in different directions; watch the airglow as the sun sets, and see what we could see in the night sky, and that type of thing. We worked on trying to tie that in to atmospheric models, trying to figure out how different things move around in the atmosphere.

Paul Geissler, on the founding of PIRL

Image processing was really just getting started. It was very awkward, very hard to do, so it was a good time to get into it. They had hired a new professor named Bob Singer, and I wrote to him even before he showed up and said that I wanted to work with him. I basically pounced on him before he even unpacked, and he agreed to take me on as a graduate student.

His idea was to start a Planetary Image Research Laboratory [PIRL], which still exists. It’s the one that Alfred [McEwen] is head of now. Bob started it. Brad Castalia was one of the first principal programmers there.

Basically it started off with eight single Sun workstations and nine-track tape drives because that’s where we got images from. We would get images and download them on the tape and basically write software to be able to process them.

Our recording medium was a camera and a tripod that took a photograph of the screen to make a slide; it was very basic. We had a gorgeous monitor—it cost twenty thousand dollars in the late 1980s. It had 1024 by 1024 pixel resolution: Unheard-of.

We picked up equipment as we went. We eventually got a digital film recorder. We got a lot more workstations since they got cheaper as more graduates started working on images. But for a while it was really just a handful of us that were trying to process images. Normally what would happen is people would get hardcopy, photographic hardcopy, and they would slice it up and paste it together.

The things that we did were actually pretty impressive, because we didn’t really have any software that we could run. We made a decision to go with UNIX, and the best image processing software at the time was run on a VAX. They had one in the CCIT, in the University computer cluster. What we would do is we would read our images off of a tape, and then we would send them over to CCIT, do the preliminary processing on the VAX, and then send them back, and import them into the software package we were using, which we were busy writing at the time because it didn’t really have much functionality.

Now I’m happy to use other tools to do it, but I’m not afraid to hack and get it to do what I want. But more importantly I know what it should do. Image processing is wonderful because in any other kind of numerical work, if you make a mistake you could be off by a factor of ten to the sixth and you may never know, but in image processing you just look at the screen and you can tell, “Oops.” It’s pretty easy.

Larry Lebofsky, on Project ARTIST

The high moments were the heyday of what was called Project ARTIST, Astronomy Related Teacher In-Service Training. We got a very large grant from National Science Foundation for working with teachers to teach other teachers. That, to me, is probably the highlight of what I’ve done over the years. I did that for five years; a very successful program. People are still using some of our materials.

Part of me says: Well, I’m at the college level; what I should be doing is at the college level. But the other part of me says: You’re not going to get good students unless you provide better training for the kids at a younger level.

At the college level, you’re not going to get better future students unless you better prepare the future teachers. So when I’m looking in my classes I always grab a hold, so to speak, of my future teachers.

Training the future teachers, giving them the background they need at the college level so they can teach future students at the University and better educate the public is, I think, an important thing to do.

Harold Larson, on the development of the Teaching Teams program

At that time the University was being more insistent that we get more involved in undergraduate education. This is when the student-centered research university was slowly becoming the mantra. It meant basically that this Department had to do more teaching.

Gene Levy hauled me into his office and said, “You’re going to teach.” So I was literally thrown into a classroom with no help. We taught just one section of an undergraduate course, so that semester I was the one teaching it. There were 90 kids in the class. That was big back then. It was in a building that was subsequently torn down, mercifully. It had virtually no AV capability, it had an overhead projector and the plug kept falling out of the wall because the outlet was so worn. It was a horrible teaching environment. They put so many kids in the classroom I had hardly any room at the front to walk back and forth without tripping over feet.

I got through it. But I vowed at the end of the semester that I was never going to teach a class that way again, just lecturing with virtually no way to enhance the learning environment. So the first thing I did was choose carefully the next room I taught in. We didn’t have our building, so there were other classrooms on campus that would have more amenities. But the other thing that I wanted to do was get the kids involved to help me do things, like being assistants for some hands-on project, just to make the classroom environment more interesting.

That eventually led to the Teaching Teams program, which formalized this arrangement, because it turned out that other faculty on campus were doing the same things. None of us knew the others existed. In ’96 or ’97, the Learning Center who knew about these little pockets of learner-centered education called us up, arranged a meeting with us and we all started comparing notes and said, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we got together and came up with a University-wide program? Let’s write a grant to the government.”

So we did and got the grant the first time through, and that’s how the Teaching Teams program formally started. There was a lot of excitement back then about the new gen-ed program, a student-centered research university, not just lecturing but getting students involved, trying to bring innovation into the classroom. So we rode on that wave.

The program has grown, and has achieved significant successes in how it’s been able to transform classrooms both by using students who are willing to volunteer and faculty who are willing to change their teaching styles. We’ve now been doing this for almost ten years, we’ve had multiple grants from the U.S. Department of Education, Hewlett Foundation, Kellogg Foundation—we’ve never been turned down for a grant, which is really exceptional in this very competitive field, because we’re always talking about doing something that addresses national programs, and we’re doing it in a classroom. We’re doing it in classrooms that no one else dares touch, the high-enrollment gen-ed classrooms.

Steve Larson, on the formation of the Catalina Sky Survey

In the early nineties, I got a call from a student over at Steward [Timothy Spahr], who contacted Ray White and told him he was interested in comets. Ray said, “Well, you’d better contact Steve Larson over at LPL.” So he did, and he was willing to work for free just to get involved. I took him on. He wanted to discover a comet.

The Schmidt Telescope that Kuiper built for Pat Roemer hardly ever got used. I showed him how to use it and how to develop films and all that. He ended up searching the sky for comets, and he found a couple. He also found a couple Earth-approaching asteroids.

This was just after the extension of the Halley Watch when Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter. Because I had so many contacts I was able to put together a network of people to observe that from the ground for the five-day duration of all those impacts. That was a whole other little project. We got very successful observations from the four major telescopes.

During that time I was attending the Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Houston every year, which is more for geologists, and that’s when I hooked up with Gene Shoemaker. Of course, he had a program for discovering comets, and much of my comet characterization was observing those comets, and in some cases observing near-Earth asteroids that turned out to be comets. I got to know him, and he was the one who really got me believing in near-Earth objects as being an interesting subject. Of course the discovery of the Chicxulub crater up in Yucatan kind of cemented the concept.

Tim and I started working on adapting that to the Schmidt Telescope up here that hadn’t been used in years. For the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact we were able to get a second CCD to replace the original Halley Watch CCD, which was a bigger and better one. But they had a sale at the end of the year and I got it cheap, so I had money left over, and that allowed me to get a bigger chip for the Schmidt. While Tim was gone at school I converted this photographic telescope to a computer-controlled detector that had a very precise field.

When Tim graduated, he got offered a post-doc here. He started experimenting with being able to look for NEOs. We succeeded in that, but we didn’t have any money. We were actually building our own computers from scratch, because you couldn’t buy a computer with the capacity. It was a very shoestring effort.

Tim and Carl Hergenrother, who came from that time—those two, me and another student, we formed Catalina Sky Survey. I worked for a couple years building up software and going to find things, and we planned to do some upgrades, and I was able to get some money from NASA to upgrade just at the time that things were starting to fail: Computer was not working, network was crashing.

Tim always wanted to work at the Minor Planet Center, which is where we submit all of our observations. We had this meeting on NEOs in Torino, Italy, where this Torino Scale was being done, and the Director at the time, Brian Marsden, said, “I really want to have Tim. Would you mind if I hired him?” I said no. I knew Tim’s life goal was to work there.

He’s now the Director of the Minor Planet Center. I’ve had great relations with them since he’s been there. It’s been kind of rocky, because again, they had growing pains, as surveys got better and better. We send in ten thousand observations a night now. So they had to handle a lot of observational stuff.

But anyway, he had the opportunity to leave. Everything was crashing around us, so I decided to take the telescope down, and start the modifications and have some new optics made. Unfortunately we were out of commission for three years. But in that time we were completely rebuilding and refurbishing cutting-edge instrumentation, for the Schmidt, for the one-and-a-half meter on Mt. Lemmon, and for the Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring, Australia, which even today is the only place in the Southern hemisphere looking for NEOs.

Comet McNaught, the most spectacular comet in our lifetime, was discovered in our survey data. We turned out to be out of commission for a while, we did a lot of upgrades, and when we came back on in 2004, we quickly became a leader and we’ve been a leader ever since. Right now about two out of every three NEOs we discovered.