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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. |
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