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| The Department Graduate Students Spacecraft Missions |
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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. |
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