The Department of Planetary Sciences

Michael Drake

The lab in 1973 was quite small. Now we have three large buildings. At the time we only had the old part of Kuiper, built by NASA in 1965. We didn’t even occupy the entire building; I don’t know how many employees we had then, but somewhere between 30 and 60 would be my guess.

It was, from my point of view, a strange environment. My degrees were in geology. I’d had some experience at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory being surrounding by astronomers, and that helped a lot, because I had learned to talk to people in very different disciplines.

In coming here, it was very much like that. Most of the people came out of the discipline of astronomy, but not all of them. It’s like the tower of Babel; you talk in your own language and your own jargon, and communicating across fields is surprisingly difficult. It took a few years before I think most of us began to understand what motivated the other ones, what we were really saying. I think it helped us to speak in clearer, plain English and minimize the jargon, because we came from such different backgrounds.

Overall, it was stimulating; it was exciting. I loved Arizona from the beginning. I grew up in England and had 21 years of rain and clouds, so I was ready for at least 21 years of sunshine. Amazingly, I’m still here in 2007; that’s 34 years later.

Robert Strom

There were not very many people doing planetary science. We were probably the only ones that had a group, you know, a lunar and planetary laboratory, just to study the solar system. We were it, in the world. Now it’s developed into a world-class facility. There’s a department as well as a laboratory. We started teaching in the early seventies, and now it’s grown a lot larger. And the subject matter has grown enormously too.

Martin Tomasko

I came here when the place was just a research lab. There were three groups: There was Gerard Kuiper, who did infrared astronomy and had Hal Larson and Uwe Fink. There was Frank Low who did infrared astronomy with George Rieke, and then there was Tom Gehrels, who had a couple of people who did polarization measurements of various things. But it was just a research lab.

Kuiper was getting close to retiring and he thought maybe the place had a lot better chance of long-term survival if it had an academic department. The place has really been strengthened in the process. Now there are people with strong theoretical interests and people with strong experimental interests and the two groups are here both at the same place, and the feedback and interchange between the people who make the observations and the people who make the models and theorize about the observations is particularly good. It’s a real strength of the place.

William Hubbard

I was recruited by Gerard Kuiper. He was a very energetic person, especially given his age. He was very enthusiastic about his new department, and he took me on a tour of all of his observing sites around the area. We went up to Tumamoc Hill where he had a planetary monitoring station—the telescope is still there—and we went up to the Catalinas and looked at what’s called Catalina Station, sometimes called the Mt. Bigelow site now.

We also went up to the Mt. Lemmon summit where he had just, not long before that, taken over the old Air Force site. He had a couple of telescopes up there. He talked to me about where he thought the Laboratory was heading and what he thought my role would be in it.

The way he expressed it to me was that the Department was going to be an essential component for keeping the Laboratory in existence. At that time it was only LPL; there was no Department. He thought that in order to ensure the longevity of the whole enterprise that we needed an academic arm; we needed to have graduate students, we needed to have a teaching program.

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The Department of Planetary Sciences, Page 2

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.

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The Department of Planetary Sciences, Page 3

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.

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The Department of Planetary Sciences, Page 4

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.

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The Department of Planetary Sciences, Page 5

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.

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The Department of Planetary Sciences, Page 6

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

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

Joe Giacalone

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