William Hartmann

I came in ’61, when LPL was located in the Physics, Math, and Meteorology Building, PMM. A group of us were located not in PMM but in a Quonset hut called T6, for Temporary Building Number 6. It was a sort of cylindrical shaped structure, on the present location of the science library. We used to have jokes about Kuiper flying into a tizzy over something and saying “Call T6, call T6,” because a bunch of us graduate students over there were either about to be chewed out or he needed us to do something.

Ewen Whitaker

We started up in very humble surroundings. We had one Quonset hut where the Science Library is now. We started up in this little hut and we set ourselves up there. But at the same time the new Physics and Atmospheric Sciences building—the PMM building it was called in those days, Physics, Maths and Meteorology—had been built and they were just moving in.

The Atmospheric Sciences had got the top floor, the whole top floor, but there was a little piece to the west end there—about the size of a small house—and they said, “Hey, you can have this piece at the end there.”

So we moved into this place from the Quonset huts, and set up our darkrooms and got on with the work of the Lunar Atlas. There’s how it all started. We started off in very modest form with just the six of us.

William Hartmann

At that time if you went into the Steward Observatory library, which I remember doing a lot, and you looked on the shelves, a lot of the astronomical literature was in publications from individual observatories. This was a tradition going back to the 1800s or so, because in those days there weren’t widespread and reliable series of journals. This was typically a European tradition, where great laboratories and observatories had their own series of publications that were sent out around the world to other institutions. Certainly some were very old, over a hundred years old, some of them. And Kuiper was still very much in that European tradition.

So observatories tended to publish their own results, sometimes as little booklets, which would be the product of some big survey program that they had been working. Those were circulated among the observatories.

That was a clear tradition, and Kuiper came in with that image in his head, and started up this Communications of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory series. That was another one of my jobs, actually, being a junior co-editor of that, to help move it along. I’d go over to the printers to deliver copies and bring them back, and sometimes editing, to make sure everything was set up right.

Floyd Herbert

There was a University President in those days, Richard Harvill, who had a lot of ambition for this University. We cheeky graduate students used to make fun of him all the time, but his idea was he was going to make the UA into “The Harvard of the West,” or something like that. So he was very open to creating first-rank departments. People of great ability like Kuiper and Sonett at the Lunar Lab and Aden Meinel at Optical Sciences and the various guys over at Steward would present him with their plans for making their respective departments much more high powered. He was quite supportive of that. That all came from Harvill. He made it all possible.

George Coyne

Finally the Space Sciences Building was built [in 1965], and we all moved in there. There was enthusiasm about all the research. Tom Gehrels was extremely active. Elizabeth Roemer is one of the best comet astronomers in the world. The Department was essentially Tom Gehrels, Elizabeth Roemer, Ewen Whitaker, Bob Strom, and then he had a lot of non-faculty positions, a lot of research positions. They were filled by younger people.

Very soon Kuiper built up some real strengths. He hired Frank Low, who was eminent. Frank Low was developing the whole field of infrared astronomy, which from that time became a very important field. In fact, although it was called the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, a lot of the research there was on non-planetary objects. Frank was there for many years in that Department, in that research group, but he was doing a lot of work on stars, on any kind of infrared source that was significant. The research was really front-line. The whole selection of sites for the Moon, the first landing on the Moon and all—that research group contributed a lot to that program. That was the early years of LPL.

Harold Larson

This building was built by NASA to provide a place in this country for planetary science to be conducted away from astronomers, because astronomers looked down on planetary people. Astronomers didn’t let planetary people have time on telescopes. Astronomers thought that the planets weren’t very interesting and asteroids were worse—stars and galaxies, these were the things that warranted those resources.

NASA of course saw the need to do supporting observations because of the space program that was just coming on line, the Apollo mission to the Moon. Nobody had maps of the Moon; nobody knew what the Moon was made out of. To take pictures and to try to understand more detail of what the Moon was going to be like when we landed on it, NASA created this place.

Kuiper populated it with people like Ewen Whitaker and Bob Strom and Tom Gehrels and Pat Roemer, all of whom were doing things that complemented each other, all of which were deemed important to provide background information for the space program. NASA built a telescope that accompanied the building, which is the 61-inch up in the Catalinas. That was dedicated to planetary work. It was a place in the country where planetary astronomy and supporting planetary research could be conducted without the interference and constraints that typically applied in other institutions where astronomy was king.

John Lewis

There was a conference here in Tucson called the Arizona Conference on Planetary Atmospheres, and as a graduate student who was working on the chemistry of Venus I came to the conference and presented a paper. Gerard Kuiper, the Head of the Department, was at the conference, and he invited me to come over and tour the lab. It was a fairly new building. It had been occupied only about three years; very up-to-date, beautiful astronomical facilities. He showed me the shops down in the basement where they processed mirrors and optics and so on.

That evening tour ended in his office. He had his office set up sort of like a church. There was a raised alter at the front of the room—a very long room—and he had a little living room set up at one end. There was a raised dais about a step high, where his desk was, down at the end of the room. Then he had the flag of Arizona and the flag of the United States on either side of his desk. You felt like saluting when you came into the room. I should have caught a clue from these circumstances that this was an unusual operation.

Charles Wood

Kuiper was very much interested in art. He studied to be a painter when he was young, and he always tried to have artists around him. In fact, he had a little cottage in the backyard of his house on Sawtelle Avenue, and he gave it free to a guy that I met, who was an artist. He wanted to have artists and art in his life. He was very interested in music and things like that. He was sort of the old fashioned gentlemen scholar, I think.

He also hired a sculptor, Ralph Turner. Ralph was hired to take the photographs of the Moon that we had from telescopes and from some spacecraft, and to make three-dimensional models of those objects—of craters, or of mountains on the Moon—and then he would have a light source that would have the light shining on his model the same angle it was for each of the photographs that we had.

He would continually change his model until it matched every photograph that he had, and then that would be an accurate model of that feature on the Moon. Then we could measure the angels, the slopes of the features, and the depths of them and whatnot.

It was a very unusual way of finding out about the topography of the Moon. If you go in the Lunar Lab, on the main floor there’s a grey model on the wall—it must be about six or eight feet across—and that’s one of Ralph’s, one of his models of a peak on the Moon. It’s still there.

Alika Herring was another one of these strange guys that Kuiper latched onto. He was from Hawaii, and he made his living doing two things. He played the Hawaiian steel guitar, and he made telescopes. He ground mirrors for telescopes and worked for a company that made telescopes for amateur astronomers.

He made a telescope for one of the Ranger spacecraft, I believe, that went to the Moon, and then he stayed on and he made drawings of the Moon using the photographs and using visual observations with some of the Lunar Lab telescopes. That was another sort of unusual thing, a throwback to the past. It used to be the way people studied the Moon a hundred years ago was by making drawings. Kuiper made the first really high-quality photographic atlas of the Moon, but he also was willing to have somebody who had keen eyesight and good telescopes to make drawings as well.

Harold Larson

I was one of the few people who could write a program in Fortran, and use the very few computers that existed. It was that combination of background and skills that allowed me to step in and take over Kuiper’s [airborne spectroscopy] project.

I remember asking him, “You know, I’ve never had…” I don’t know if I said this, but I didn’t think I could name the nine planets.

He said, “It doesn’t matter. You learn planetary science by doing it.”

To this day, the department says we don’t offer an undergraduate minor or major in planetary science because you should be good at something else. Be a good physicist, a good chemist, geoscientist, and you can pick up the planetary stuff on the job. Kuiper saw no problem with hiring me without any background in astronomy. In fact, it’s not been a limitation.

William Hubbard

I talked to Kuiper some about his philosophy of planetary exploration. He said, “What do humans do when they get to a new place? The first thing they do is look around. You have to be able to look around.”

I was trained as a traditional astrophysicist. Astrophysicists don’t look at pretty pictures. They look at data and they apply high-powered mathematics to analyze the data and infer basic physical processes. Just looking at pictures isn’t going to get you anywhere.

That was part of the, I might say contempt, that the astrophysicists had for planetary scientists back in those days, is that all they were doing was looking at pictures and they weren’t doing fundamental science.

You have to disagree with that when you start seeing pictures like the Cassini pictures which show such intricate physical processes; for example, the rings of Saturn. There’s so much beautiful physics being exhibited there, and certainly even in landforms on satellites. So I think that was a rather unenlightened point of view, which probably originated with just the low resolution of images available from spacecraft in those days.

Robert Strom

Even before we had the lunar orbiter, there was a program here which I was involved in to obtain high resolution telescopic images from the Earth. That was done right here in the Catalina Mountains, with a telescope that Kupier had built and was sponsored by NASA. We went up almost every night to photograph the Moon at the highest resolution we could and produced an atlas from that.

William Hartmann

In the mid-sixties, when I was still a graduate student, I have distinct memories of walking across the campus and looking up and seeing the daytime Moon in the Arizona sky very clearly. I’d be thinking to myself, gee, it’s only going to go around maybe 60 times before we actually try to land on it. Having grown up looking at the Moon through my telescope in the backyard and making drawings of the craters and so forth, it was kind of a personal relationship with the Moon.

Michael Drake

In Kuiper’s day, it was initially planetary astronomy. He realized that going to the Moon you were looking at a rocky body. He brought in some of the first planetary geologists. Bob Strom is the most prominent of those—to this day he’s the world’s expert on Mercury, and the guy who figured out that Venus was resurfaced a few hundred million years ago.

Kuiper’s appreciation of geology actually came from a very odd thing. He got it in his head, correctly, that Mauna Kea in Hawaii would be a great astronomical observatory site. In the process of looking at Mauna Kea, he flew over the lava flows in Hawaii. He recognized what lava flows looked like from the air, and then when he looked through telescopes and subsequently orbiting spacecraft at the Moon, he realized he was looking at lava flows.

That sounds like a simple thing now—we all know the dark areas of the Moon are made of basaltic lava—but in the 1960s, before Apollo, there were other thoughts. Harold Urey, Kuiper’s great competitor—along with Kuiper one of the two founders of planetary science—thought the Moon was completely primitive, undifferentiated. He called it a Rosetta Stone: You could see what all the original building blocks looked like if you went to the Moon. But Kuiper knew what lava flows looked like from above, and realized he was seeing lava flows out there.

Paul Geissler

When Gerard Kuiper first got here, his charge was to map the Moon, and understand the geology of the Moon well enough to be able to land a person on it, because this was imminent. They were going to land somebody on there, and one of the hypotheses at the time was that the thing was just an electrostatically-charged clump of dust, and as soon as you stepped out of your spacecraft you were going to fall into dust as high as your eye.

It was an unlikely theory, but there was no way to prove it wrong, because nobody had done the research. And we were just a few years away from landing somebody there. That was why LPL got started to begin with, so one of the tasks was to make really good maps of the Moon and be able to choose places to land.

What they would do is go out to the telescope and take these gorgeous pictures of it, but of course it was what we call a point-perspective projection. It’s not even a round globe; it’s just what you see. What they would do is put those in a slide projector, take them down to the basement, and in the basement of LPL—I think it’s still hanging up there now—is a round sphere. They’d go way across the building and project this thing onto the sphere from a distance, and come around and take photographs of the sphere. They’d be able to get various perspectives of the Moon that you wouldn’t be able to see from Earth. Things that looked like ovals would become circles. The things those guys did in the days before digital image processing were amazing.

Harold Larson

This was an exciting period of time when things were being done for the first time. In that kind of environment, this is where discoveries are made. If you’re the first person to ever look at something with a particular technique and a particular wavelength region, with some resource that no one has ever had access to before, the easy things are hanging there waiting to be plucked.

Kuiper and Frank Low and us—myself and the men who worked with me—we were plucking all the easy things. We were discovering water on Jupiter and a lot of things that with hindsight were easy. But back then none of us really felt comfortable. We were always pushing the limit of something, and never knew what was going to happen, and always surprised and amazed that we were achieving results that got national attention. It was a privileged time to be working in science.

Robert Strom

Kuiper passed away at Christmas time, in Mexico, in 1973. That was just after the launch [of Mariner 10]. The first encounter with Mercury was March of ’74, so he missed it. That was a shame; he never got to see Mercury. But he had a crater named after him both on Mars and on Mercury.

Ewen Whitaker

Round about the time Kuiper died, we were beginning to get in people from outside with these other fields. The whole subject was already expanding with all this stuff, especially that came back from Apollo with all the samples, a huge amount of geophysics and oh, just the whole plethora of subjects that were coming along. People were being hired at LPL to take over or help with these other, outside subjects. So from then on we started expanding in all fields.

Floyd Herbert

Way back in the beginning Kuiper and that bunch were advising the lunar astronauts what to do when they got to the Moon. To give them a little bit of ground realism, they used to haul them down to a volcanic area just over the border of Mexico called the Pinacate Mountains. It’s a volcanic field. There are cinder cones and calderas, the geologists call it, which is basically a circular hole in the ground that’s created by some kind of explosion.

So they took the astronauts down there at least once and they went around with their rock hammers and picked samples and stuff like that. Bill and Dale and Alan were part of that. They were very geologically-oriented, at least in those days.

Then they started going down there just on their own for fun. I used to go down there with them. We’ve made many trips down to the Pinacates—go down there, camp out, take some pictures. My buddy Chuck Wood did his master’s thesis down there, marching across some of the craters with a gravity-measuring device and a magnetic field-measuring device, which gives you some clue as to what’s under the ground there—big masses of basaltic rock have a little more density, so you get a microscopic extra gravity down there.

So some real science was done down there, but it was also a lot of fun. Nobody else went there. We pretty much had it to ourselves. Then it got to be more widely known, of course, and it suddenly became popular to go out into nature, so lots of people started going down there. The Mexicans turned it into a National Park, and now there’s a bunch of rules and regulations. Hardly anybody ever goes down there anymore. But in the old days it was a great thing. It was the closest thing to going to the Moon that we could do.

Charles Wood

In the late sixties I had long hair, and marched in some protests and whatnot, and so Kuiper thought I was sort of the resident hippie of the Lunar Lab. But he knew me, so he knew I was all right. He would come to work every Saturday morning and he would get lonely or something. Every once in a while he would send the student worker over to my apartment, and she’d knock on the door. I’d usually be asleep—this was Saturday mornings—and she’d say, “Dr. Kuiper wants to talk to you.”

So I’d go over there and he’d just ask me a few questions about something and then he would start storytelling. He told me about after World War II when he was trying to find [Wernher] von Braun, who was the German rocket designer, because the United States wanted to bring von Braun back to the U.S. before the Russians got him. He had part of a German rocket motor that von Braun had built in his office, which he showed me, and he talked about his early days as an astronomer. It was really amazing to have him need an audience, and I was the audience.

He was concerned that the students were going to riot at the University; that they’d be so upset with the U.S. government that they’d riot. He thought because the Lunar Lab was funded by the federal government that they might attack our building sometime. So I had to assure him several times that I didn’t think the students knew the Lunar Lab was funded by the government, or cared.

Dale Cruikshank

At that time Kitt Peak had only one telescope, and it was the 36-inch telescope, which has since been replaced with something bigger. We had to drive up the old road, which is still maintained as an emergency egress, but it was a terrible dusty old road. On several occasions we would drive up there in the back of a pickup truck, Kuiper and I and one other student hanging on more or less for dear life, because our old car broke down and we had to go up that way.

William Hartmann

It must have been ’69, I’m sitting there in my assistant professor office, and the phone rings. It’s Bruce Murray, who’s a very well known planetary scientist, who was Head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at that time. I picked up my phone and here’s Bruce Murray saying “We’ve got this probe going to Mars, would you like to be on the imaging team?”

So it’s falls right into my lap. I contrast that with today: When a new mission gets announced they’ll be 200 bright, bushy-tailed scientists with fresh PhDs trying to get on that mission. Everybody’s trying to get on. Usually you have like ten people initially and maybe you add another ten if the mission gets launched successfully. Six of those will be the old, established people in the field anyway, so then there are two or three or four slots for young scientists who have to compete with all these other scientists.

I’m so lucky, I’m just at the right time and the phone rings and Bruce Murray puts me on his imaging team. It really was kind of a golden age of science. Kennedy had said that we’re going to the Moon, so we’re all engaged in that program. There was very few of us in planetary science at that time. Kuiper’s first group of students included Toby Owen and Carl Sagan before him—Carl Sagan had come out of the University of Chicago when Kuiper was back there—so you have Sagan and Toby Owen and Cruikshank and Binder and me, and a handful of other students at a few other scattered universities at that time. It was a great time to be doing this stuff, because there weren’t very many young people coming out with degrees. Bruce Murray has to scrape the bottom of a nearly empty barrel to get me.

Charles Wood

I was very lucky. We were all pretty good friends. We’re still friends today, almost fifty years later. We all would work together and go to movies together; I remember when we saw West Side Story, and we all came out walking in a line and snapping our fingers like we were the Jets.

It was really a transformative thing in my life to be at the Lunar Lab. I came being a person who was fascinated with space and science fiction, and I had built a small telescope when I was in high school and looked at the Moon and the planets. But being at the Lunar Lab I was immediately in contact with the most important planetary scientist on the Earth, Kuiper, and the people I worked with, the guys who were graduate students, Hartmann and Cruikshank and Binder, were all doing neat research things.

It was a place where I saw there were opportunities and I could do more and have a more exciting life than perhaps I might have thought. If I hadn’t gone there maybe I would’ve ended up being a shoe salesman or something. Again, the word lucky keeps coming up. I was lucky to have that chance.

Harold Larson, on the airborne spectroscopy program

I’d never been in Arizona, so I just got off a plane and here I was. Everything was new, shocking. I didn’t know what was happening because I took this job by mail from France. I like to say I was a mail-order professor. I hadn’t made any visits; I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never met Kuiper; all I had was two letters from him.

So that was the way I arrived, and it took a while to settle in and figure out what my role would be. Kuiper of course was pioneering the use of aircraft. He wanted to use this particular type of spectrometer that Harold Johnson was developing, perhaps more for use on the ground, but Kuiper saw a role for it in an airplane.

So there was an emerging technology, all kinds of changes, all kinds of potential—discovery potential, you might say—and Kuiper had the sense to know that he could be one of the first people using it.

That’s why he hired me through the mail. I was working in France on a post-doc with a team of people who had also been pioneering the use of this kind of instrumentation, not for aircraft, but for ground-based telescopes. I had become familiar with the optics, the technique, the computer programs. My job when I came here was basically to step in and pick up the pieces, and continue developing this program of airborne spectroscopy.

So as soon as I got here I got engrossed in what he was doing on the CV-990; that was the four-engine passenger jet that NASA had acquired. Nothing worked. Nothing even came close to working. But we acquired experience with trying to make things work in what really is a very hostile environment.

Then something very tragic happened. The plane we were using crashed. It crashed out on Moffett field, in the Bay area, and that put an end to what Kuiper was trying to do. But by that time he had demonstrated well enough the potential that NASA replaced that plane with a bigger plane, the C-141, which is a military aircraft, and which eventually had a 36-inch diameter telescope. That isn’t a very big telescope by today’s standards, but it’s a very big telescope because it has to look through a hole in a plane that wasn’t designed for it.

That facility came on-stream after Kuiper died. He saw the plane, but he never flew on it. He walked through it, but he never flew on it. It was eventually dedicated to him. After he died it was dedicated to him because of his pioneering work directing NASA’s attention to doing astronomy this way.

The C-141 became operational in ’74. I was one of the first groups to fly on it, and one of the last. For me it was about a 25-year involvement. It was a plane that had no insulation, so it was noisy, it was cold, it had no windows, and you just sat their for 72 hours being bored because nothing was happening, or when you were observing, you were watching your instrumentation, you were worried about things going wrong every second, and while computers were running everything you were always ready to press buttons and take control if something happened.

Observing isn’t pleasant. It is hard work, it’s tiring, and 80 to 90 percent of what you do is never useful for anything. It’s a very low efficiency operation. But then you get a discovery. And then you forget all the bad moments because suddenly something is important. We had enough discoveries to make the whole effort worthwhile.

George Rieke, on inventing infrared astronomy

Gerard [Kuiper] had a sort of strange attitude for something called the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, that is, he brought in people that did, I would say, slightly offbeat but very technically advanced kinds of astronomy. [Harold] Johnson left before I joined the lab, but I gather that he used to joke that he was in the stellar division of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, which was sort of true.

Because Gerard had this interest in infrared, one of the offbeat areas that flourished was infrared. So he brought Harold in, and Harold had been befriended by a young physicist named Frank Low while he was in Texas. Harold quickly became Frank’s mentor in getting into infrared astronomy. So then you had three major figures in infrared astronomy—not that there was a field of infrared astronomy, but they became major figures as time went on and people realized how much they developed it.

Harold was the premier person in photometry. He knew how to take the data so you could inter-compare stars and study them and actually make field advances in science. He really started with the first photometry measurements in 1961 or 1962, and in 1966 he published a review article with all the infrared photometry results that he had done. That review article is still cited. It’s incredible that in four years he went from a clean sheet of paper to a mature area of astronomy.

Harold had ideas of how to build [photometric] telescopes that would be cheap, they didn’t have very good optics, and they could be moved quickly around the sky, which meant you’d unclamp the telescope and move it manually, just hang on the telescope and move it. The 28-inch was the first one. Harold and Frank then developed and carried out all kinds of pioneering infrared astronomy using the 28-inch. Harold then got a 60-inch telescope built, which followed the same premise of the photometric telescope. It was getting about as big as you could move with my hand, but that’s how it worked. We shifted a lot of these efforts to the 60-inch.

Gerard had his own 61-inch, and interestingly, I found a progress report that Gerard wrote on the 61-inch about a month after it was first being used. In the progress report it said that Frank had discovered the internal energy of Jupiter—which was one of the major discoveries of infrared astronomy—within that month. It tells you something really interesting, which was that infrared astronomy was super-ready to have discoveries come out. There were things that were well within in reach of the detectors and capabilities that people had then, just sitting there, super-saturated with discoveries ready to be made.

For quite a while the 61-inch in the infrared—at least the thermal infrared, which means the wavelengths beyond two microns—was by far the most sensitive telescope in the world. We used to make observations and send them over to Caltech where there was another infrared group, and they would actually not be able to confirm the observations, but they turned out to be right. They had the 200-inch, but the fact that we had optimized the 61-inch so carefully for this application gave us a big advantage.

There were really three centers of ground-based infrared that sprang up. There’s this one, and shortly after Caltech under Gary Neugebauer, and not too long after that Ed Ney at the University of Minnesota. I think the fact that there were three was actually important. You wouldn’t tell the deep secrets of how you did something, but you would show enough that people could benefit from what you’d done. In some ways the rivalry was fiercer than at present, but in other ways it was much more gentlemanly—the way you imagine science should be done, where people pass things around and say, “What do you think?” I think that sense of community was really important to getting the field started.

George Coyne, on the balloon polarimetry program

My original work with Tom Gehrels was great. We had a nice team there [including Krzysztof Serkowski, Martin Tomasko, and graduate student Ben Zellner]. We would fly balloons, because these were early days of the space program, so you couldn’t send a rocket off into space at that time. But you could send up balloons, which would get up above a lot of the Earth’s atmosphere, and do research in infrared from balloons.

There was an agency of the federal government called the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR. They had a site in Northern Arizona and a site in Palestine, Texas for launching these things. One of the exciting things we’d do is once or twice a year we’d go to these sites and we’d fly these balloons. They were very early days so even methods of collecting your data were being developed.

Then the polarization went into all kinds of new and exciting areas. We first discovered that some stars give off polarized light. That’s very important for knowing the kind of structure of the atmosphere of the star. Then we found that some galaxies give off polarized light, because they have very energetic sources at their center and that light is scattered as it comes out from the galaxy. So that whole research in polarimetry began to broaden from planetary into all kinds of other objects. They were the early days of my research.

Don McCarthy, on observing with Frank Low

Frank Low was always fun on observing runs, because he has this tremendous insight into what problems were. We were just exploring. We measured some of the first sizes of astronomical objects. That became my thesis, and it led to me doing the same kind of work at the Multiple Mirror Telescope [MMT], which back then was six separate 72-inch telescopes.

No one had really ever envisioned that you could adjust the way light bounces to each telescope so that all those distances were equal, so that instead of the telescope performing as six separate 72-inch mirrors, it performed as one 6.5-meter telescope that you just used six parts of. We learned how to make those adjustments. That was the start of a different kind of interferometry, which you have today at many different facilities where the telescopes are separate and you bring the light together.

One day we were driving up the MMT road [on Mt. Hopkins] for one of these observing runs, and this was before the MMT was dedicated. They had what were called Friday Night Specials: They would have Friday nights devoted to scientists who would come up there and try to do experiments under non-ideal conditions. We were doing one. So Frank’s driving us up the mountain, which is a very scary road and was scarier then before they paved a lot of it.

We go around a corner—it’s a one-lane road—and this big Greyhound bus comes down suddenly from the other side. Frank’s reactions were very quick: He took us right into the side of the mountain; not on the outside of the mountain but the inside.

The Greyhound bus—there was no way that momentum was going to stop. They were practicing for the dedication of the mountain the following week or two. Those Greyhound buses were out there without anyone’s knowledge, just learning the road.

The interferometry actually began on the 21-inch telescope here right behind us. Frank gave instructions that if I ever got it working to phone him no matter what time it was. So I remember 3am phoning him when we had the first interferometer working. That led to the MMT eventually, and to the design of the Large Binocular Telescope because it’s two separate mirrors whose light you want to combine. So the legacy of that was pretty huge, and we had some fun times doing it.

There aren’t many times when you have a place or a group of people who start something completely new. It’s getter harder and harder to do, I think. What Frank Low did with infrared astronomy is simply not common or maybe not possible today: To make a new kind of detector or instrument here on your desk, take it to a mountain, put it on a telescope and discover that Jupiter has its own energy source. That’s just not common. To explore a whole new realm of the electromagnetic spectrum was really odd. Or to start a whole new way of exploring, namely the space program, which LPL figured in so prominently, is really amazing. It’s not like it was in the LPL days of infrared astronomy, where you put together a detector and haul it up a mountain and you’re doing an observation and discovering something all in the same day.

Steve Larson, on Kuiper’s search for telescope sites

I grew up under Kuiper’s style. Most of the great investigators and scientists at the time of course were very proud of their work and worked hard to maintain their position in the field and all that. But Kuiper was of such stature, all the people in the lab basically went along with what he dictated.

He was fully aware of the fact that in the post-Apollo era of NASA it might be difficult to get funding for the kind of research that was going on at the time. So he started looking at other sources. He was spending a fair amount of time with a colleague in Mexico, Guillermo Haro, who was interested in striking up collaboration with American observatories. They had some money at the time to build an observatory, so he spent time site testing for new observatories. He used to fly down to places like Southern Baja with small telescopes, to see what the seeing was like.

One of Kuiper’s true legacies was identification and establishment of what are considered now great observatories. He was the primary ruler in establishing Mauna Kea observatory, and in fact the first telescope set up there to do site testing was an LPL telescope, a little 12-inch telescope that was used to determine how good the seeing was. An observer went there for several months out of the year. That kicked things off at what many people now consider now the premier ground-based site.

Funny as things went, that was sitting on a cinder cone that is now considered sacred, and there is no telescope there. It’s the one peak that has no telescope. All the telescopes are on other ones nearby. He was getting ready to put a proposal to NSF to build telescopes up there with Harvard, and the Hawaiian politicians got involved, saying Hawaii should be involved, so they ended up going another route to develop the telescopes. But he also, in conjunction with the Mexicans, helped established the San Pedro Mártir Observatory in Northern Baja. In fact the crew that attended the telescopes here took a month off and went down there and actually plowed the road to the top. That turned out to be a very good site.

He was always looking for high sites. He had looked at the San Francisco peak, Agassiz Peak as a high altitude site. The higher you go, of course, the less water vapor you have to look out through, which absorb infrared radiation, so you want to be in tall mountains. His search for the ideal infrared site was one of the reasons they named the Kuiper Airborne Observatory aircraft, the C-141, which was used with a 36-inch telescope for many years.

Of course Kuiper had worked hard to establish the telescopes on the Catalinas, and had in fact, when the Air Force vacated their summit with the radar site, wrote a proposal to use that for a site, which is still used today.

William Hartmann, on the Mauna Kea telescope site

In the summer of ’64, Kuiper was the first person to get the idea that there should be observatories on Mauna Kea, or at least that Mauna Kea might be a fantastically good site for observatories. This is funny because what they were looking for was lack of water vapor. Water vapor absorbs the infrared light coming in through the atmosphere, so you want to get up above it. You’d think the worst place would be out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But Mauna Kea is so big—14,000 feet—it sticks up above most of it. Kuiper hit on this idea of going up there and seeing if there could be an observatory there.

Kuiper had a history of hiring interesting, off-beat people, like Ewen Whitaker. He had been the head of the lunar section of the British Astronomical Association, which is basically an amateur association. Another example was Alika Herring, a guy who built very high quality amateur-sized telescopes, and Kuiper hired him to come in and take his homemade telescope down to Hawaii and do site testing down there.

In the spring of 1964, Alika had been down there for a couple of months, I guess, living up at the 10,000 foot level in little stone cabins that were sort of Ranger cabins and then driving up to the 14,000 foot level at night. Okay, time for Alika to have a vacation. Kuiper sends young Bill, me, down to Hawaii.

That was the first time I had ever been to Hawaii. I just completely fell in love with the Big Island; it’s such a wonderful place to be. Kuiper said, “Now, you take some days off and go down to see the volcano part, because this is part of your training, and see craters and lava flows and all of that,” which I had not seen before, coming from Pennsylvania. So I did site testing down there, for what became Mauna Kea Observatory.

Some years passed, and that turns into a big world-class observatory. By the 1980s, Dale Cruikshank, my buddy who had worked on the spectrometers for Kuiper, had gone off to the University of Hawaii and is doing infrared spectrometry, and following exactly the footsteps that Kuiper had trained him in.

Mel Simmons, on the construction of the 61-inch telescope

I came in ’64 at the request of Dr. Kuiper, because the construction of what we call the 61-inch, later referred to as the 1.5-meter, had been stopped. The U of A had more billings than money available to complete the telescope. So the Comptroller’s Office stopped construction and said, “No more work until we see what’s going on.”

Kuiper called me, and I went in and took the job to see what was going on. I worked over in the Comptroller’s Office for about a month. I got a copy of the contract with Western Gear because that’s where the problem was, with the telescope itself. Not with the dome, but the telescope. I went over every invoice from the time it started to where they stopped it, and then I classified all the invoices paid or not paid, as well as what I thought were erroneous billings.

Anyway, I spent about a month going through all the invoices, and then I told Sherwood Carr who was the Comptroller at the time that I was going to call Western Gear, the contractor, and tell them I would like for them to send a man over to go over every invoice, one with the authority to void an invoice. I spent about three weeks with him, and he agreed with me, and okayed all the ones I said were okay and voided all the others.

Anyway, to make a long story short, we finished the construction. Kuiper had an optical professional from Scotland [Robert Waland] to grind the mirrors that was to be in the telescope. We made the mirror in the basement of the Space Science building. Probably the instruments used for the grinding are still in the basement. When Astronomy got in on it later in the years—because they wanted to put all the telescopes together—they referred to it as a 1.5-meter.

We had enough money left to do the dormitory. We went ahead and started construction, and because we didn’t go through Physical Resources they wouldn’t furnish anybody to look at the construction and see if it was being followed the way we had it outlined. So I used Arnold Evans, who was in charge of the observatory facilities, to check all the construction because I was down here and didn’t go up there that often.

He did a great job. We finished the construction of the dormitory; we still had a little bit of money left over. So I talked to the contractors that built these cabins, and he gave me enough—just gave it to me—enough redwood to cover the steps. The telescope was up above and the dormitory was down, behind it, on the North side. So we had to have steps, and in the wintertime those would be covered with snow, and a tired man observing was liable to slide all the way down. So we covered the steps with redwood and made it safe.

Later we built another telescope up there, a small one, for Dr. [Elizabeth] Roemer. Dr. Kuiper was spending most of his time trying different areas, testing them, and some of the areas he tested were Pikes Peak, Colorado, and Flagstaff. He went over to where the University now has telescopes on Mt. Graham, and he did a test there. As I remember, Dr. Kuiper felt there was a little bit too much moisture as far as he was concerned, so he dropped that.

But then he went to Hawaii, Mauna Kea. We took a 21-inch telescope over there, about halfway up the mountain, where he did a lot of testing. He talked NASA into building the telescope that’s there, through the University of Hawaii. He then tested the Mexico site for a telescope. We built a road to the top so he could test the site. He put a 21-inch telescope up there for testing; later on they had their telescope up there.

After Dr. Kuiper left, he still went on to do all this testing. We have the radar site that’s up on Mt. Lemmon itself. It was owned by the Forest Service. But the military had it as a radar site and there were a couple of radar buildings up there. I went out and talked to the DM because I was in the materials division of the Air Force and I was in the Army Air Corps then; it’s just Air Force now. I went out and talked to them and they gave me a letter releasing the site, to the University. Then I went to the Forest Service and they approved it.

We took over their buildings and they’re still there. There were two domes that weren’t quite what you’d want for an observatory, but they still worked fine for infrared, and that’s what we had to do. We got tractors and snowplows and trucks and trailers and stuff we needed when we were doing all this testing of different sites for Kuiper. One of the tractors went to Mexico when Arnold Evans built the road up to the top. That’s where they have their telescope now. I think the 21-inch is still about halfway up to Mauna Kea, before they get in to where they need to have oxygen. That’s where he did his testing and found it to be great.

That’s the reason I came in was to get the construction of the Kuiper Telescope—then the 61-inch—done and completed. I think there’s probably a 21-inch telescope in Flagstaff, too; I think he left one there. You’ll find them all over. I think there’s one in Flagstaff, one in Hawaii, and one in Mexico. He used them for testing.

Ewen Whitaker, on the 61-inch telescope

In the earlier days, when we first got the telescope going, in order to have the eyepieces together I’d got a “Saniflush” box, a junk box, made into a thing with holes so the eyepieces would sit in it. I believe it’s still up in the dome. Completely wrecked, I’m sure. You’d think, okay, we’ve got these highly expensive eyepieces, let’s make a nice box for them, a wooden box. Was it ever made? No.

George Coyne, on the consolidation of the telescopes

Up until that time all the telescopes had been naturally under the administration of the Astronomy Department. When Kuiper came he got NASA funding to build what was then a major telescope, which is still there near Bigelow Mountain. The 61-inch it’s called. That was built to be a high-quality imaging telescope for the Ranger program, to map the Moon to select the sites. Of course that came under the administration of LPL, and eventually the Department of Planetary Sciences.

Ewen Whitaker

Ranger 6 went off on the day it was supposed to. I’d chosen a place in Mare Tranquillitatis where the angles would be right and it’d be free of rocks and hopefully we’d photograph some domes on the Moon as it went down. But of course Ranger 6, something went wrong with the high voltage in the spacecraft. Before it got out of the atmosphere—and of course in low-pressure atmosphere you can jump sparks long-distances—sparks must’ve jumped and burned out the cameras or something.

So poor Ranger 6 never took any pictures. This was pretty sad. We were all at JPL and the launch was successful and up it went. We got there and we were all chewing our pencils waiting for the news: It’s getting near the Moon—time for camera switch-on—no news of camera switch-on. We’re getting closer to the Moon, distance to the Moon only a thousand kilometers—still no sign of warm-up, switch-on. The signals had ceased. We said, okay, the spacecraft has crashed.

That was Ranger 6. All right, back to the drawing boards. They found out what they thought was the problem with the high voltage, and redesigned it slightly. The next one was Ranger 7. I got this call from Gene Shoemaker once again: “Please find places for Ranger 7 to land.”

The third day of launch would’ve been the best one, and that was the one that was chosen. It went off because the weather was good, and finally got there and everything went fine—Yes, we’ve got camera turn-on! We were all at JPL, there was Urey, and Kuiper, and me, of course all the JPL engineers and everything; it was a big whoopee-do.

There were no pictures coming back live, we couldn’t see anything, but we could hear the signal from the cameras, just a tone coming in, signaling that the video was coming in. It was being recorded out in the Mojave Desert there, one of the tracking stations. So that was that, and of course it was hey, hey, popping champagne and everything.

But of course we hadn’t got the films. They had to be stored, put in a truck and driven down from the Mojave Desert which was a hundred-and-some miles away, so we didn’t get them for quite a long time. Then we got these things and they started printing out of pictures from them, and we got the first few prints—Oh, look at this, wow, you can see these craters! Of course the thing’s photographing as it came in closer and closer, just a solid series of pictures from all these six cameras, and so the view that you got closer and closer all the time.

The press conference was going to be that day, so I think we were all up 26 hours without any sleep. Anyway, Kuiper was on it: “This is a great day for science and a great day for the United States,” and a big whoopee-do and everything. That was very exciting.

Then I went back to England, but I had a two-week stay over here because we got all the negatives of the films—35 millimeter films, just like you put into your camera, but very long films—and then I chose a selection of things and printed up all these negatives. Oh, I tell you, two weeks of solid darkroom work. We got back to Tucson eventually and we had five months of writing out experimenter’s reports, so that meant looking at all these pictures and coming up with our theories. It was really an exciting time but very busy.

Charles Wood

Kuiper was the Principal Investigator, and finally Ranger 7 worked. It had television cameras that photographed ever-closer views as the spacecraft approached and finally hit the Moon, and these were broadcasted live on national TV. I remember Kuiper being interviewed right after that happened, and his first statement was, “This has been a great day for America, this is a great day for science.” That’s how he began. So it was really stirring.

Alan Binder

The first time I knew of Kuiper, he was on television. He had been interviewed at McDonald Observatory—I can still see an image of him standing out on the balcony, talking about astronomy. Kuiper knew that you had to get the public interested in what you were doing. That was a source of funding. He had the European polish and he could talk people into doing what he wanted to in terms of money. Those were his great qualities: He sold what he was doing.

He was the Principal Investigator on Ranger. There were several Rangers and they all failed, and finally we got to Ranger 7 which worked. It took amazing photographs. Bill and Dale and I would run down to the newspaper because they would get the first pictures; because television didn’t quite carry them in the way you wanted it to.

Ranger had gone down and taken these incredible photographs as it crashed on the Moon, and Kuiper got up at the news conference at JPL, and in typical Kuiper fashion, “These pictures are not ten times better than astronomical pictures, which would be phenomenal in itself. They are not a hundred times better than astronomical pictures, which is what the engineers promised us. They are one thousand times better.”

It just brought the house down. He just had that way of connecting with the public. I learned that from him: That you need to have the public involved, and that’s what really counts. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand that. Kuiper really valued that, and I give him a tremendous amount of credit.

Charles Wood

There was a sequence of a wide-angled view and then closer, so a smaller area being seen. The thing we realized was, my gosh, there were craters everywhere. The most close-up picture that we had, there were still craters everywhere. And my job was measuring craters, and I thought, my god, this is never going to end. There’s going to be continuing stuff to do here.

Guy Consolmagno

The thrilling thing was not just seeing the Moon coming at you—because they had the first picture, the next picture closer up, the next picture close up—but below they said, “Live from the Moon.”

Steve Larson

At that time I was working in the darkroom. We got the first high resolution images of the surface of the Moon from this crash-landing spacecraft. After many tries, they finally got a couple to work. It was all very exciting, because we were trying to extract as much information as possible just from imaging, and there was a lot of contention at the time about whether or not the surface was even strong enough to sustain the landing of a spacecraft. Some people predicted this was a very loose, powdery thing that would just swallow it up when we tried to land.

Charles Wood

Kuiper got time on the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope and Alika Herring and I went up to see the impact of Ranger 9, because there had been some suggestion that the Moon had a lot of dust on it, and there might be a large cloud of dust from the impact. So we got to use this really large telescope to look at the Moon with our eyeballs. Almost nobody, then or now, looks at the Moon with a large telescope with their eyeballs. I remember the stability of the atmosphere for seconds would be very good, and we could see tiny, tiny craters on the Moon that no one had ever seen before. They had never been photographed before. It was just very exciting. And when the spacecraft hit—we had the radio on; we could hear when it hit—there was absolutely nothing. That showed us and anybody else who was concerned that no, there wasn’t a huge amount of dust on the Moon.

Robert Strom

Gerard Kuiper and Ewen Whitaker were involved in what was called the Ranger program, which was to send a spacecraft to the Moon and hard-land, impact it, but on the way down take these high resolution pictures, getting closer and closer and closer to see what the surface was composed of.

Ranger 7 was the first successful one, and sent back these high resolution pictures. We looked at those, and did geological analysis. There was still a debate about what the craters were. Were they volcanic or were they impact? That was a heated debate and was really not settled until probably around the late sixties. It turned out that the evidence was very strong that these were impact craters and not volcanic at all.

But it was still argued about what the lunar maria was. This is the dark areas of the Moon. We thought it probably lava. Others thought, no, it was just dust that you’d sink in. Well, the high resolution images from Ranger did not answer the question of whether this stuff was dusty or whether it was solid rock. So after Ranger, there was the Surveyor spacecraft. These were soft-landers, and during those missions there was also a lunar orbiter sent up there to get very high resolution images of the surface of the Moon. Then when the Surveyor soft-landed that would tell whether it would hold the spacecraft or sink in.

It turned out that the Surveyor spacecraft showed that the Moon’s surface was in fact firm enough that it would hold up a spacecraft landing on it, and it dug in the surface and sent back high resolution pictures. It became very clear at that point that, yeah, you could land a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon without it sinking down to hundreds of feet.

Ewen Whitaker

With Surveyor 1 was on Gene Shoemaker’s team. We were in charge of the cameras, what they would photograph. With the first Surveyor, they tracked it down and it photographed all the flat areas, the panoramas. But on the horizon there were little bright peaks. They knew roughly where they were on the Moon, in Flamsteed P.

The people at JPL and others, they figured out the place the thing had landed, because of the way the peaks looked. This was their theory and they published it in Science. I looked at this and thought, “I don’t know, that doesn’t sound right to me.” So I did a real job, I got some better pictures from JPL. They sent them to me of the mountains that you could see in this little piece of the panorama, and I got one of our best pictures—we’d taken it with the 82-inch in Texas—and sort of straightened it up and did the angles. I figured out where this had to be on the floor of this Flamsteed P flat area so that the angles of the peaks that you were seeing fitted in with what we saw from our Earth-based picture.

Well, that didn’t agree with what they’d written up in Science, so I had to look and see what were the two things the Surveyor radar caught as it was landing, and lo and behold, looking around, there were two very bright little tiny craters. I thought, Oh-oh, I betcha those were the two things that caused the blips in the radar, and therefore from that you could see where the thing had landed.

So I said that Surveyor was right about here. Once they photographed it, it was almost exactly where I predicted from the two craters—very close, within a hundred yards or something. We found out later that Orbiter 1 had actually photographed this thing with its low-resolution camera. You could just pick out a bright spot. Well, then they said, “You’re the one who’s going to find out where these things land in the future,” so that got me that little job, amongst others of course. That was exciting days with all the Surveyors.

Robert Strom

Then things started happening very rapidly, because we were approaching the Apollo era of sending men to the Moon. I was on the lunar operations working group for Apollo 8, 10, and 11. Apollo 11 was the one that landed. We briefed the astronauts on what targets they should image from orbit—they had very good cameras in orbit—and where to take pictures that would be of high scientific interest. All of that is up in the Space Imagery Center here.

Alan Binder

Apollo, in my estimation, is the best thing that humanity has ever done. It was thrilling, because we thought the space program was going somewhere. We were reaching the Moon. Gene Shoemaker had told his students that you’ll be doing your PhD thesis on the Moon. That’s what we believed. It was what we all wanted—some of us wanted to go to the Moon, but we all wanted to study the Moon and the planets. The whole world was listening. Even though the Commies, the Russians, were beaten badly, they were thrilled. The only country that I believe did not tell its people was Communist China. The rest of the world was totally engaged in Apollo.

To see Armstrong and then Aldrin get out, and of course you’ve seen probably the ghostly kind of images—the first TVs weren’t all that hot. Your heart was skipping. God, we’re down! Get the rocks, get the thing done, get back in and make sure you get back. It was so new and it seemed so dangerous that your heart was just in your mouth, so to speak, because you wanted it to succeed. I have all these fantastic memories of Apollo and the men on the Moon, and I envied them so much because I wanted to go. And I still want to go.

Jonathan Lunine

Everybody who was alive at that time, except for the jaded, know where they were when Apollo 11 landed, and I was at the Desert Inn Motel at Miami Beach, Florida, which is where my mom used to take us on summer vacation. Very cheap motel, but it was by the beach. We were there and I remember watching the TV and getting the news about the landing. It was evening there in Florida and then the excitement of being allowed to stay up late to watch the moonwalk, but we didn’t have to stay up late because the astronauts were actually able to get out earlier than expected. We watched these pictures and it was really, really exciting. It seemed to me as a ten-year old that it was the start of a new era.

William Hartmann

I saw the Apollo 11 landing. I was actually up in Flagstaff. My wife Gayle, who I was going with at the time, was working up at the Museum in Northern Arizona. We were invited across the street from the Museum of Northern Arizona. There’s a big, beautiful, white-framed farmhouse-looking thing which was a building that belonged to the Museum. The staff had all gathered there.

We were all sitting around in this nice quaint old house watching this television set. There’re coming around the Moon and now they’re coming around the back of the Moon and yes, we’ve got radio contact again, and now they’re coming around the front side and they’re going to go down and land. [Chet] Huntley and [David] Brinkley were saying this thing about, “Okay, this is such an amazing moment in the history of humanity, we’re just going to stop talking and let you listen to the chatter between Houston and the astronauts,” and that was all coming through. The landing maneuver was just about to start. They’re doing their engine-burn and they’re going to go down, this is going to start in the next few minutes, this is all going to happen, and this little five-year-old kid shouts “Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom!” and Daddy has to take him out just at the moment when we’re landing on the Moon.

Charles Sonett

We were halfway between Italy and Corsica, just a summer vacation. It was midnight, and all the Italians on board were being very happy about it all. Just at the moment of landing they were all looking at the TV, and they were whooping it up. It was a very intense time for people working in space. Spent a lot of time in the lab—I remember 60, 80 hour weeks. If you’re getting ready for a flight, you know, you don’t have time to sit around, you have to work day and night. Crazy schedules.

Floyd Herbert

One of the big surprises for everybody was they actually did go to the Moon, but it was the government that did it. Everybody had always thought that it would be some sort of pioneering industrialist that would finance this thing and they’d build it in their backyard. Then it actually happened and, my God, it was a 25 billion dollar project run by the federal government, and bureaucracy as far as the eye could see, because if you didn’t have bureaucracy you wouldn’t get anything done.

Randy Jokipii

There’s nothing like observing new things. I think most scientists feel that way, no matter what their field is. I can remember in 1969 I spent two weeks in Budapest. This was when the Iron Curtain was still strong.

People would just walk up to us in the streets and say, “Congratulations, Americans!” I still remember that. That was very riveting to them. I think part of it was a reaction to the Russians, because they were under the foot of the Russians at the time. But also it was partly that it was a very exciting time.

William Hartmann

I actually got to see Apollo 14 launched, which was very impressive. The big physical sensation is just that the low-frequency sound. You can actually feel it sort of hitting in and vibrating your stomach. That’s the sound the microphones can’t catch.

Charles Wood

On the wall of the Atmospheric Science Building there were posters for the International Geophysical Year, which was 1957-58, and one of those posters was the western half of the United States as seen by a rocket—one of the rockets that we had captured from the Germans with von Braun. We would launch from New Mexico to explore rockets and to explore space.

There was this fantastic picture that showed the curvature of the Earth, and showed New Mexico and Arizona and California and northern Mexico, and I saw that in the early sixties when we first got there. To me it was more spectacular of the picture we later saw from Apollo, because it was so much earlier.

William Hartmann

They had launched the first weather satellite, and here was this first picture of the cloud formations of Earth as seen from space. Those kinds of pictures really affected our view of our planet.

I’m a big fan of the early artistic renditions of the solar system. Chesley Bonestell was the father of astronomical art in the United States. He had seen the first V-2 pictures from New Mexico looking down, and New Mexico had a very specific kind of cloud pattern. There are lots of these little individual cumulus clouds, and they would actually cast a shadow. Bonestell would paint the Earth this way, with these little patchy clouds.

Nobody realized that these clouds were organized into these huge systems; these big cyclonic bands and spirals and so forth. People knew a hurricane was a spiral, but the early artists trying to understand what the Earth would look like from space didn’t sense the extent of it —they painted all the clouds as sort of separate little clouds because that’s what you could see from the V-2 photographs in New Mexico. So that first picture coming in from a weather satellite, and the idea that they were going to be able to track these systems, was an amazing thing to look to.

Robert Strom

The first picture of Earth from space was not taken by the astronauts. It was taken by the orbiter. It got the horizon, and there was the Earth. It was not in color, it was in black and white, but there was the Earth. That was the first picture of the Earth ever taken from a great distance. It was amazing.

Now the public really didn’t know about that photograph very much. But when the astronauts returned the first pictures of the Earth from the Moon—that was Apollo 8—it kind of shocked people. The reason it shocked people: Here was this little blue marble sitting there in black space, and you could hardly see the atmosphere. Then I think it dawned on people, wow, we live in a precarious environment, and the only thing separating us from death is this thin atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen.

Charles Sonett

There was one very interesting picture especially, taken from the Moon. You could see the oceans of the Earth, and the clouds. That’s something to think about. That’s worth contemplating.

Don McCarthy

You put a picture of the whole Earth from space in your class, and you ask the audience when they saw that. Young people cannot answer that. You cannot answer that, most likely, because you’ve grown up with it. Whereas people my age saw the transition, of being able to see part of the Earth to the whole Earth. It is speculated that that new view of the Earth as a whole from space inspired the whole environmental movement, and certainly has changed the way generations of people around the globe think of themselves as fitting into the universe. Not just one locale; now we think globally. What price do you put on a single picture that had that impact? It’s priceless.

Alan Binder

I don’t think it was so much seeing the Earth from the Moon: It was being on the Moon. Man was up there. You could look up, and people were up there. Because I had my telescope, I would look at the landing site and see the mountains and see the craters and I knew there were people down there. I could look in the window at the television and see those mountains. That was an amazing connection to me.

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.

Dante Lauretta

We’re going to get better and better at characterizing planets around other stars. That’s going to be a big thing. We’re going to start to find smaller planets, Earth-like planets. I think—I’ll make a prediction here—we’re going to start to realize that Earth-like planets are relatively common and this will feed into the whole idea of, is there life on other planets out there? We’re going to learn to detect remotely any signs of life—if it’s an oxygen-rich atmosphere, or if it’s some other atmospheric signature, or maybe it’s something you can see, changes on the surfaces or something like that. I think we’re going to really start to get better and better at characterizing and detecting extra-solar planets. That expands our number of targets from nine, keeping Pluto as a planet, to hundreds and thousands of objects in nearby space to us. Planetary science is going to blossom enormously because there’s simply that many more planets out there that need to be studied.

William Bottke

I think the fact that the field has grown so much is because there’s so much excitement in it right now. It’s not just our solar system, either; it’s the discovery of planets in other solar systems. The big growth areas I see are extra-solar planets, which are now a really hot topic; and I also see astrobiology. It’s growing in fits and starts, but ultimately there are really interesting constraints that planetary science provides for life and vice versa. I think that will be another big growth area as we become more sophisticated. 

Alfred McEwen

Scientifically, the lab is getting more and more interested in extra-solar planets. Exobiology, astrobiology, things like habitability—you can have a discipline in astrobiology even if you don’t find any extraterrestrial life. Stephen Gould called it “that great discipline in search of its first data point.”

Jay Melosh

I think since the discovery of extra-solar planets, planetary system formation has gotten to be more respectable astronomy. We now have a lot more bridges with the Steward Observatory. There’s a group there that works on planet formation and collaborates very closely with LPL. That old separation is being healed over.

Nicholas Schneider

It’s a joy to see each of these worlds turn into a place that you can get really familiar with, intimate with. But the nature of science is changing for each of those worlds; the obligation of how much you have to explain is correspondingly higher. I do see us turning more and more worlds from complete unknowns into well-categorized places, but the fact that we’ve found planets around other stars means that we’ve got a good set of fuzzy points of light that we have yet to explain. I find extra-solar planets a true growth field for planetary science.

Peter Smith

The more you learn about life on the Earth and the incredible things it’s done to adapt to strange environments—for instance, even here in Tucson, look at the Palo Verde trees. If you take a seed off a Palo Verde tree and put it in some nutrients and add water, it will not grow. Why not? Because its seed coating is so tough that water can’t penetrate. The only way a Palo Verde tree can sprout is if the seed, which has landed on the ground, runs along a stream and wears off the outer part of the seed coating. Then it will sprout. So it only sprouts when it’s wet. How does a tree know how to do that? That is really clever. And that’s just one out of a billion example of how life adapts.

Life came almost instantly on the Earth after it cooled. Mars would have cooled first, and water would’ve been stable on the surface. There’s probably lots of water on Mars. Certainly we see remnants of it today. Why wouldn’t have life formed immediately there? And if it did, why can’t it adapt as ferociously as life has on the Earth to every little niche and cranny, including, as the water dried up, underground? It would’ve gone right underground with the water, wouldn’t it?

I don’t know if the ice in the northern plains of Mars is where life took hold or not, but it’s a good chance. That’s where water comes up to the surface. There’s ice all under the surface, probably all around Mars. This is the one place you can get to it. So we’re hopeful. What are the chances? I try to keep myself from getting too excited. Basically we’re throwing a dart at a map, and what are the chances that that’s the place? I am feeling lucky though.

Dante Lauretta

There’s no evidence for it, so scientifically we have to say that the jury is out. Based on my studies of the origin of life and the chemistry involved with basic processes I’d say it is very likely that biology is going on somewhere else in this universe. We haven’t figured out exactly how the origin of life started, but we’ve got a pretty good framework for how it could get going. Nothing seems like a show-stopper right now. There are some critical steps we need to work out, like how you make up a polyimide molecule, but all the basic building blocks are there and they’re very common. So I would say yes, there’s a high probability. There’s just no evidence for it, or against it.

Renu Malhotra

I’ve wavered with this, being pessimistic and optimistic. At this point I’m pessimistic, and the reason is that there are so many things that have to go just right, for an Earth-like planet as we find it today. A lot of things have to come together just right, just so: Quite narrow ranges of physical parameters and initial conditions for Earth to be comfortable for life, particularly advanced life.

But then, you know, it’s a pretty ill-defined question. How close do conditions have to be for us to say that some alien planet is an Earth-like planet? Conditions may be equally exciting and interesting on other planets, other worlds, but totally different than on ours. 

Alexander Pavlov

Astrobiology is a new direction in science, which is really on the border of biology, astronomy, planetary science, and atmospheric science. People are interested in the origin of life and specifically how life evolved together with the environment, and whether life can be present on other terrestrial planets like Mars or elsewhere in the universe.

You really have to go to the boundaries of these disciplines to answer those questions. That’s why NASA has this new initiative to essentially sponsor that new direction which we call astrobiology. My interest in the astrobiology is from the climate standpoint. I want to know what kind of environment and what kind of climate was there at the moment of the origin of life, at the early evolution of life in particular.

The main interest is to study Mars, because Mars—I won’t say it’s the only place we expect to find extraterrestrial life in the solar system, but it’s the most reachable place. There are other potential places like Titan and Europa, but they’re much further away, although they’re extremely interesting as well.

But Mars is relatively accessible and there’s a whole kind of express of missions that’s being developed. It is important to know where exactly you’d expect some kind of life, if life was there. There are all sorts of questions we can get from the atmosphere. The discovery of methane on Mars is a very strong indication of life. But is that true? Is it confirmed that this is a direct sign of biology, since methane is a biogenic gas? So there are a lot of things that atmospheric science can give you. That’s why I see myself entering into this field.

The beauty of astrobiology is that you can have an idea and you’re working with scientists in different disciplines, biologists in particular. Biologists don’t know anything about planets or the Martian atmosphere, really. But if you know how the climate works and what to expect on the Martian surface, you can give a biologist a clue on how to set up a particular experiment in order to test what particular bugs are going to live there or not.

I think there’s a very strong indication [that there could be life on Mars]. There are so many suggestions that, well, the UV radiation is a problem, lack of water is a problem, ionizing radiation, superoxidants is a problem. It is a harsh place, there’s no question of that. It’s cold there. But the more we start learning about extremes of life, we’ll be smarter where to look. Don’t go to directly the surface, go a little bit underneath. You have ice there. The water is maybe not stable at the Mars surface because of the very low pressures. But if the ice is underneath, all of a sudden we have a layer that has water in it, liquid films. Yes, it’s not as stable as an ocean, but how much do you really need for the microorganisms to survive? Not much.

When you start doing all this, then the objections that people have about life on Mars kind of fall. You find out that, yes, there are bugs here which live in the Siberian permafrost, with conditions very similar to what’s there. There are microorganisms that can take extremely high dosages of radiation. The fact that Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, and a very thin atmosphere bombarded by cosmic rays, is really nothing strange either. So really there’s no reason why not. I think we’ll be witnesses to this kind of discovery being made.

Guy Consolmagno

Oddly enough, I think it will be a three-day wonder and then people will be worried about Britney Spears again. The fact is I don’t think it will be a radical shift in anybody’s thinking, because I think everybody expects it to happen sooner or later anyway. By the time it does happen, the reaction will be, “Well, it’s about time,” or “Didn’t they already know that?” Even if it was intelligent life. I think, also, if we do find intelligent life we’ll find out that their way of communicating, their kind of language, is so utterly alien from ours that we won’t be able to communicate. But, who knows? I still read that science fiction, and anything’s possible.

John Lewis

You look at our little eight or nine, or eight-and-a-half, planets and think that that’s a fair representation of all that planets can be—uh-uh. It’s just a small taste. There are many other possibilities. The purpose of my book Worlds Without Endwas to spell out some of those other possibilities, and to open people’s eyes as to why a few government dollars properly spent on discovering planets of other stars might tell us an enormous amount about our own Solar System, our own Earth, its relationship to the other planets, and the big questions: Are we alone in the universe? Are habitable planets possible?

There’s sort of a popular misconception that the reason the Earth is inhabited is become we have oceans and a wonderful oxygen atmosphere, but in fact the reason the oceans aren’t frozen is because we have life on Earth regulating the composition and thermal properties of the atmosphere, and the reason we have oxygen in the atmosphere is because plants grow. Earth has adapted to life.

Jay Melosh

I think astronomy continues to play a major role in planetary science. I think that will always play a role in planetary discoveries. It’s true the way you learn about the surface of Titan is not to look at it from the ground. That view is very limited, even though we have people like Caitlin Griffith who did a lot from the ground. But really the way to do exploration is to go there.

There are people in laboratory who started out as traditional astronomers. That was the origin of the lab. Kuiper was a traditional astronomer. Before there was any space program that was the only way you could study the planets. In spite of that, Kuiper started the lab knowing that there would be exploration of the Moon, and wanted to position himself to take advantage of that, which worked out very well.

But we still do a lot of ground-based observing. Right now there are extra-solar planets, although there’s a lot of desire to move that into space and do that better. Another thing that’s been an important part of the lab has been the study of near-Earth asteroids. Tom Gehrels, who’s been here since Kuiper, started years ago his SPACEWATCH® program, looking for threatening near-Earth asteroids. Right now there’s his SPACEWATCH® program and the Catalina Sky Survey, both within this lab, doing that job, as well as other agencies.

There’s still a fair amount of asteroid study that’s ground-based. I think the lab’s got a pretty good mix. If you decide you really need to study things through a telescope, telescopes are available, facilities are available. Bob Brown, before he got completely consumed by the Cassini mission, did a lot of ground-based observing in the outer solar system. So I think we have a pretty well-balanced program.

Humberto Campins

It is clear that there is much science that cannot be done from the ground. There is very important science that can only be done from the ground. It’s very complimentary. The spacecraft bring the resources that you cannot get otherwise. The budgets of spacecraft missions are considerably larger, and you can get expertise, and you can develop a laboratory facility that you wouldn’t be able to develop otherwise. That was a logical shift for the Lunar Lab, which has been very good for its reputation. I think it plays very nicely with the astronomy and telescope expertise. I’d say that this is one of the great successes of the Lunar Lab.

Robert Strom

When I first started this [research], global warming was well established. The thing that was very controversial was what’s causing it. Is it human caused, or is it a natural phenomenon that is occurring? That was debatable when I was teaching. When I retired, that was no longer debatable. It’s actually human caused, from emitting greenhouse gases, CO 2. This all started during the Industrial Revolution. We started getting out of equilibrium in about 1850 or so.

At that point I decided I was going to write a book on it. It took me five years to do it and I just finished it now. It became very clear to me that we had an enormous problem that was being ignored by politicians. It’s a problem not for me because I’m not going to live long enough, but it’s a problem for our grandchildren. They’re going to have an awful problem unless we do something about it now. It could lead to catastrophe. In fact at the extreme warming it could easily lead to the end of civilization as we know it, unless something is done now. We have to do it now. We can’t wait 30 years, until everything starts falling apart. If you wait that long it’s too late, there’s nothing we can do about it because of the inertia of the system. That’s why we have to start now. So that book [Hot House: Global Climate Change and the Human Condition] is dedicated to the grandchildren of the world. I hope that the parents and grandparents will do something about it.

When the grandchildren grow up and get to be the leaders, if we haven’t done anything about it it’s going to be too late. There’s nothing we can do about it, except some very expensive things which I call geo-engineering which scare me almost as much as global warming.

The optimistic thing is, we can do it. We have the technology. Technology got us into this mess and it can get us out. So I’m optimistic in the sense that yes, if we go ahead and start now—and they’re some encouraging signs that we may be doing this—we can conquer it. We’re still going to experience global warming, but the thing is, it’s possible to keep it below the critical level, so it isn’t the disaster. Attitudes are beginning to change, which is good.

I’m really concerned about it, because I love humanity. Gosh, you know, if you look at some of the kids, they’re brilliant. Some of the students that I deal with are great, wonderful people and extremely smart. To lose that to me would just be awful, a tragedy that I don’t even want to think about. So that’s why I wrote the book. That’s my sayonara.

Martin Tomasko

Cassini is really the last, big, flagship-class mission—there’s infrared spectrometers, there’s infrared cameras, there’s visible cameras, there’s ultraviolet spectrometers, ultraviolet cameras. Whatever part of the spectrum, there’s some physical phenomenon going on inside of the system. Even if you haven’t thought of it in advance, you’ve got everything there you could ask for to measure that phenomenon analytically and to understand it.

The trend now is no more big flagship missions; they’re too expensive. We can’t afford that. So we’re going to have now more focused missions. But if they’re all short and sweet and different, the effect is, you’re going to drive more and more of the groups that do this kind of work out of business.

There’s 300 scientists working on Cassini, and that’s wonderful. But when Cassini comes to an end that’s the last of those missions, and you’d better be interested in Mars, which cheaper to get to, and closer, and we’ve got sort of a continuing program. If you’re interested in the outer solar system, you’re in trouble.

The fact that it was an international mission meant that it could do things that no single country can do by itself. It was really the best of both worlds. It was scientifically robust, and it was financially robust. It had good reasons for continuing, and it was very sophisticated and could do good science.

The best future for space science would be if the Japanese, the Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans all threw in together and flew joint missions. The joint missions would be really good ones, and everybody would want to keep it going because they’ve got all these international collaborations going.

Dale Cruikshank

The Europeans are doing more and more. There are collaborations with the Europeans in progress and some that are of course planned for the future. There are a lot of people coming into this field. A lot of young women are coming into space science, which is changing the demographics in a favorable way. There is no shortage of really exciting programs and projects and problems to work on. I think it’s an extremely exciting future. We’ve accomplished an immense amount, but we can certainly see the directions to further deepen exploration; more exciting science without end.

Mark Sykes

Whenever we go some place new, it’s always interesting. But we’re kind of getting out of that phase of solar system exploration, where we can just go some place and see something we haven’t seen before. Now we’re getting down to, “What are we learning from this? How does this fit with the other information that we’ve got?”

It’s a really transitional period. To go to new places, it’s further away. In order to do new things like a sample return, it’s more expensive. These missions are more and more expensive to the point that they’ll eat your lunch. They’ll eat everybody’s lunch. So now we’re pushing into an era where we’re going to have to get smarter about our investigations. But there’s just so much more knowledge we have yet to gain and learn by doing that.

I see us playing a role in the future in human exploration. Can we live out there? Are there resources we can make use of that would minimize the cost or even make human activity in space self-sustaining? It’s not guaranteed to be yes, because the question hasn’t been seriously asked or investigated. But it’s a neat problem. The goal would be, if it is possible, to be the first people to establish a self-sustaining presence in space.

Where do we get water? What about near-Earth objects that come by at low velocities in the Earth-Moon system? A friend of mine calculated that at any one time there should be about a dozen of these things within the radius of the Moon. We just don’t see them. Is there a sufficient frequency of objects that would be potentially water-bearing, that could sustain our transportation needs once we’re in lower orbit?

You see what the options are, and you figure out what’s the most cost-effective way of following them. It would be an adventure, because we don’t know what the outcome is. There’s a lot of testing, a lot of experimentation, a lot of science that needs to be done. Planetary scientists would be the native guides. We’re the ones that know what’s out there and what needs to be done to read the grass and the footprints, and find the buffalo. Assuming that there’s vision at the national level, there could be a very interesting future for people in my profession.

John Lewis

My interest for several years now has been the economic pay-off of space exploration, making the resources and energy and materials of space available on Earth to solve our problems here. I’ve been spending a lot of time working on sources of energy for Earth to relieve our dependence on imported oil and fossil fuels in general. The energy resources of the solar system are effective to use, but getting to them is a real challenge. Getting that pipeline installed and opened is a real challenge. It makes the Alaska pipeline look like nothing.

Space science has to be done first, but if you draw up a list of the things that space science needs to know, and a list of, say, the things a mining engineer would need to know, the list has a huge overlap. There are many things that are on both lists. A science program that is well done, that has a few engineering tasks added on, will meet everybody’s needs, and will permit rational, informed planning of exploiting those resources.

Dante Lauretta

We’re going to continue our active exploration of the solar system, and it’s hard to predict but I have a feeling it’s going to be a much more international adventure. We’re going to see the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians, the Europeans, and probably other nations that are just now gearing up—maybe Korea, Brazil—expanding into outer space. I think that’s a good thing, because it’s going to drive our competitive spirit, and there will be more resources put into space.

Space will become much more commercialized. You’re going to start to see real estate business setting up shop, either through tourism or advertising or bringing souvenir material back and selling it, that kind of thing. I think we’re going to see a huge explosion in the commercial development in space, and science will go along for the ride. It’ll be easier to get to space, we’ll be able get to these targets, and science will benefit enormously from that.

Charles Wood

We have to dream, and we have to be looking for something new to explore, to encourage us to invent new technologies, to encourage us to try to do new things. I don’t know that civilizations become great just by staying at home and growing corn and taking care of their families. Those are things that you have to do, but it seems to me we ought to do a lot more.

Adam Showman

Planetary science is very small field. There’s maybe about two thousand planetary scientists worldwide or so. Every school in the country has a physics department, compared to like ten planetary departments. But to me, there’s an intangible aspect of science. It’s like art. How can you say what price tag it is worth for an artist to paint the Mona Lisa? Sure, you can auction it and claim that’s what the value is, but up front you don’t know what you’re going to get. So there’s some value in just: Let’s discover what’s out there, what the universe is, what it’s like, and what our place in the universe is. I think the role that plays in society is very similar to the role that art plays, in the sense that it’s that “Gotcha!” It gives you something extra when you look at the night sky.

People often think of science as producing things, or how we make the world better: How we get better seatbelts or better whatever, better frying pans. That’s actually a misconception of what science is. Spin-offs are useful, but if they really want those things they should put it directly into research on seatbelts or frying pans or whatever. The research, the knowledge in and of itself is beautiful, and I think that’s why we do it.

Charles Wood

When I was young and when I was at the Lunar Lab in the sixties, I thought I’d probably go to the Moon. I think most of us, the younger students, thought we’d probably be doing planetary geology on the Moon or on Mars. It was a big disappointment when that didn’t happen. My dream all along has been that we would have people doing work and living on these other places. I think we know now it’s a lot harder than we used to think it might be. But I think we should still do it.

I used to teach, and I would tell people to have a longer perspective. The perspective I used was the orbital period of Halley’s comet. Halley’s comet was last visible in 1986. Mark Twain was born in 1835, and halfway through his life he said he came in with the comet and he’d probably go out with the comet, and he died when Halley’s comet came the next time. That’s 76 years. If you think in terms of 76 years as one cycle, if you think back to the 1500s, 1400s, and every time Halley’s comet came close to the Earth before that, the people on Earth were pretty much living in an agricultural environment. There were flare-ups of culture in Greece and China and places like that, but pretty much life was fairly agricultural.

When Halley’s comet appeared in the 1500s and 1600s, the scientific revolution had started, the Renaissance had started. The first scientific society was 1669 in England. As Halley’s comet came every 76 years, the next time it came for the last three or four hundred years, we’ve had lots of technological advances. For example, in 1835, we had the steam engine that was invented; we were doing trains. By the next time it came, 1910, airplanes had been invented. By the next time it came, in 1986, computers had been invented, spaceships had been invented. So if you look at how much change there was between one time Halley’s comet was near the Earth and the next time, it’s just phenomenal. It’s almost unbelievable, the technological changes that have occurred.

So I assume that the same sort of unbelievable changes are going to occur between 1986 when it last here and the next time, 2050 or whenever it is. I think the next time it appears that there will be people on Mars studying it as it goes past Mars, and they’ll be people on the Moon studying it as it goes past the Moon, and they’ll be other people flying in spaceships alongside of it as it comes into our solar system so we can study it better.

The time after that, that Halley’s comet comes, about 150 years from now, we’ll be living throughout the galaxy. The rate of technological expansion is just extraordinary. So if we don’t kill ourselves because of environmental degradation or nuclear war or something like that, humans will be throughout the galaxy. It doesn’t seem to me it’s so much of an extrapolation. You should be planning what your life is going to be in the solar system, not just what your life is going to be on Earth.

Joe Giacalone

We’re literally in the golden age of planetary science, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, going to Mars, going to Saturn, going to Jupiter, going to the Moon—the textbooks literally have to be written constantly to keep up with the new information. Planetary science is just growing like crazy.

Solar physics is an area that is expanding, and there’s a lot of emphasis on understanding how the Sun works. It’s been recognized fairly recently that the Sun itself undergoes changes. It’s got the 11-year sunspot cycle, and it becomes active and can have these huge solar storms that can affect communications and things. This is kind of a new area of research that’s come up, that’s been given the blanket term “space weather” or “living with a star”—buzz words that have come about. That’s been the big emphasis for the last five to ten years. When I came here in ’93 I don’t think “space weather,” that term, had been invented yet.

Renu Malhotra

The major exciting thing for me now in the last two or three years is inner solar system and the bombardment history of the planets. Now that we have strengthened the idea that there was indeed a cataclysmic bombardment, there are still many unanswered questions about it. What exactly was the mechanism that made the asteroids turn into projectiles at that time? It’s very exciting to be able to probe the early history of the Earth and inner planets, and one of the things that is especially interesting to me about it is that any mechanism that explains the late heavy bombardment is going to have something to do with what was going on in the outer solar system too.

As it turns out, to launch the asteroids out of the asteroid belt and into the inner solar system, you likely have to use the gravity of the big planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. That means that what was going on in the outer solar system had a profound effect on what happened in the inner solar system, including the Earth.

Just being able to connect such diverse areas—to be able to connect what is essentially planetary geology with orbital dynamics, and the terrestrial planets with the outer giant planets’ history—I think this lab is probably one of the very few places in the world where something like that could happen, because of our diverse range of researchers.

Dante Lauretta

There are a lot of meteorite dealers that show up at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. I started going to that, and I met Marvin Killgore, who was at the time a meteorite dealer. He’s one of the rare meteorite dealers that was very interested in meteorite science and was preserving these at his expense—basically not selling all his best stuff, so he could keep it and do research on it and provide it to scientists for research.

We realized that the commercial meteorite world was in a crazy state right now, with millions of dollars being traded in meteorites, and meteorites being harvested at very rapid time-scales compared to the rate at which they fall on Earth. This was kind of a bonanza, similar to a Gold Rush period in the 1800s, and it was going to die out like the Gold Rush did too. All the good meteorites were going to be recovered, and if we didn’t do something to preserve them, there’d be nothing left for future generations to work on.

We decided to try to create this Southwest Meteorite Center, and we hired Marvin at the University of Arizona. He still works for us. We’ve been going for about a year now, with pretty good success. We have some potentially very large donors interested in contributing, which is really what we need in order make this thing a long-lasting success. It’s kind of a save the world crusade that we’re on: Save the meteorites.

Jonathan Lunine

I am involved in two missions that are under development. One is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is the successor to Hubble. I also recently got selected as part of a team to build a mission to make measurements of Jupiter, called Juno, which will really focus on the structure and composition of Jupiter. That should launch in 2011. I’m involved in studies of future missions to Titan, particularly balloon missions.

The field is exciting; the questions have become sharper and deeper. There are a lot of mysteries in the solar system and beyond to understand. I hope I live long enough and the program prospers enough both to find planets like the Earth around other stars and to get this darn balloon to Titan, so we can get a camera all over the surface at close range and really see what’s going on. If those two things can happen, I’ll be tickled pink. If they don’t, it still has been a great ride.

Alfred McEwen

I’d really like to get back to Io. Io was my first love. It’s a tough sell because there are very dim prospects for finding life as we know it on Io. It’s dry, it’s sulfurous—hell, basically. It’s not a nice, warm, cozy place for life as we know it. But it’s spectacular with all the active volcanism. The time hasn’t been right to send a dedicated mission to Io, but maybe that time will come.

Don McCarthy

You would’ve thought that we’d learn everything about the planets by now. But it keeps getting more and more surprising. I am amazed by the activity on Saturn’s moons, the geysers from Enceladus. To be honest, I’m convinced it has to happen on Pluto now. Pluto’s atmosphere has waves in it. Something has to cause the waves. There has to be activity of some kind on the surface of Pluto. It’s too small a place to see it directly, so you’ve got to probably wait until 2015 when the spacecraft goes by. But they should see geysers or some sort of activity on Pluto.

The solar system just keeps surprising, whether it’s individual objects or how they interact with each other. To me that’s one of the most beautiful parts of it, to see the orbital relationships. The solar system has a lot to tell us yet, about individual objects and their general patterns. Then to relate that to other solar systems that are being discovered is pretty amazing.

I think NASA’s about to have another press release that says there’s another planetary system somewhat like ours that’s being discovered. Those are rare. There are very few systems that are like our own. It’s kind of funny because people argue that planets formed from a common process that occurs naturally by the formation of stars. That does seem to be true, but we can’t reproduce the exact details of our own solar system. All these planets are different; where they are, how they’re situated. The Earth may actually still yet be fairly unique.

That could be wrong, because we don’t have the technology to see Earth-like planets yet. But where we are in our orbit, how long we’ve survived, and with the Moon that we have, it seems at the moment to still be very special and unusual.

Martin Tomasko

We proposed for DISR, the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer, for this Titan entry probe mission. The deal was, Cassini and Huygens were a joint U.S.-European mission. The Americans were going to be primarily responsible for the orbiter—they had two-thirds of the experiments on the orbiter, and two-thirds of the vote on how the orbiter payload was going to be distributed. The probe was going to be mostly the responsibility of the European Space Agency. They got two-thirds of the instruments and two-thirds of the votes deciding the payload.

I had an instrument on the probe, so I knew that was going to have a heavily European flavor, and I thought it was important for us to get some European co-investigators and get a strong European participation. Peter Smith, who was here working with me on things in those days, and I went to Europe. I remember tramping around France and Germany visiting various places and trying to draw out interest in being a collaborator on this experiment that we had in mind for this European entry probe.

Peter Smith

This was fun because we were Americans on a European mission. But we were worried that without European partners, our proposal wouldn’t be attractive to the European judges. We didn’t know any Europeans. Back in the eighties, there weren’t very many Europeans in planetary science; they were mostly in astronomy. That’s totally changed today.

We went to the Paris Observatory one fine day, up on a hill—it looks like an old palace. There’s a big dome that astronomers used back in the seventeenth century. It’s really an interesting place. There’s a small building back in the trees and a big lake next to it with fish jumping.  Totally different from American science; this was dripping with tradition and charm.

We met Michel Combes and presented our proposal to him. We said, “You guys can help us build the instrument, and in exchange you can participate in the full science of the mission. We think you should build an infrared spectrometer.”

As soon as we made that proposal, they all broke into rapid French. Marty and I couldn’t understand a word. It was too fast. Everybody talking at once—this is the French way. It turned out, for the lab to take on our project, everybody had to agree. If one person didn’t agree, they wouldn’t do it. So several scientists over there had to choose our project over the other possibilities they had. That’s why they’re taking this quite seriously.

Eventually they said, yeah, they thought this could be a good project, and they’d probably be interested in helping us write a proposal. So we said, “Great. We’ll count you in.”

Then we flew up to Germany. We drove way away from all the big cities. At that time Germany was East and West.  Within about two miles of the Wall, in the middle of a cow pasture, there was a brand-new, modern building. That was the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy, out in the middle of nowhere.

We met this fellow that we’d heard studied comets, which at least was in the solar system. His name was Wing Ip. His response to our project: “I have no interest whatsoever.”

Oh, my gosh. What do we do now? “Is there anybody else here?"

“Well, there’s one guy who sent a camera to Halley’s comet in ’86. Try him. His name is Uwe Keller.”

So we went out to see Uwe Keller. Now, Uwe Keller, unlike Michel Combes, is bigger than I am, bald-headed, and very aggressive. He says, “Yes, we’ll do it. We’ll provide the detectors.”

“Great.” We have no knowledge of Uwe Keller, but off we went.

Now we had two Europeans. We wrote the proposal, and then I became the project manager after we won. We had Lockheed-Martin building it. I’d never managed a hundred thousand dollar project much less a twenty million dollar contract, with Marty’s help fortunately. We had a lot of learning to do as we built this instrument.

Lyn Doose

The big break came when we won the Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer experiment, which was the camera on board the Huygens probe. It was a spectrometer and a specialized camera to look at the Sun to determine the aerosol properties, and covered visible, infrared, violet and some of the ultraviolet.

Cassini was launched in ’97. I was primarily responsible for the software. It was really interesting software; it was adaptive in nature, so that if something happened in Titan’s atmosphere, the instrument would respond to it. At the same time, I wasn’t just an instrumentalist. We published papers along the way; we became experts in radiative transfer. We became one of the first groups that could really interpret photometric observations, and spectrometric observations of planets with thick atmospheres. We published a number of papers on Jupiter and Saturn based on the Pioneer results, and also on Venus, with the Pioneer-Venus results.

So we were well situated to analyze the Cassini-Huygens data when it came back, and it finally did in 2005. Things didn’t quite go the way we expected. The probe spun backwards from the way it was supposed to go. The probe oscillated a little more than we expected it to, and it went outside the tolerances. It made the data much harder to interpret than it would’ve been otherwise. But we’ve done it and actually we’re about to publish what we think is the definitive paper on Titan’s aerosols.

The highest moment is when I got up on January 14, 2005, and turned on the TV and already there were pictures from our instrument, sitting on the surface of Titan, showing these pebbles and this kind of dry riverbed. Obviously we had made it. We had landed on Titan. It was just unbelievable.

Jonathan Lunine

Cassini, of course, is a very large planetary mission. The goal is to explore Saturn and its rings, its moons—especially Titan, a large moon with an atmosphere—and the magnetic environment of Saturn. The mission came about in part because NASA was planning a mission to orbit Jupiter after the Voyager missions, and it was natural since both Voyager flyby spacecraft went on past Saturn that they would plan the same thing. The twist, though, was that the Voyager flyby of Titan turned out to be so interesting, and Titan turned out to be such an interesting place, that not only was the U.S. interested but Europe became interested.

It was a very straightforward collaboration, to get the United States to build a Saturn orbiter, and the Europeans to build a Titan entry probe that would be carried to Titan by the Saturn orbiter. The entry probe would go through Titan’s atmosphere and make measurements. That was Cassini-Huygens. By the mid-1980s, the general architecture of this mission was well-developed. There was a lot of fine-tuning of the political process so that both the European Space Agency and NASA would get going at the same time. That’s tough, because if NASA wasn’t interested, ESA couldn’t be interested, and if ESA wasn’t interested, NASA wasn’t so interested, so they had to move together.

The metaphor that vividly I remember was a balloon launching from the U of A mall, where there were like 15 or 20 manned balloons, and they were all launched. I think they don’t do that anymore at the U of A, probably for insurance purposes. You know, when a balloon takes off, it takes off. But there were these two balloons that they decided to tether together and have them take off at the same time, which was quite a stunt. Of course you can’t have one balloon get too much above the other balloon, because they’re tied together. So one balloon has to go up, then the other, and these go up in a stair-step fashion and it takes a lot longer to get to altitude before they finally cut the rope from each other and let each other go.

It was that kind of really delicate process that was required to get Cassini going in 1989-1990. A lot of us here at LPL applied for different roles; I applied for the role of Interdisciplinary Scientist, which was not someone who would build instruments, because I was mostly a theorist, but somebody who would have responsibility for a science area. I proposed for Titan’s surface, and would use instruments to understand in a holistic way what Titan’s surface was like, which was one of the big mysteries left over from Voyager.

That was my first really big proposal. It got me involved officially in Cassini. Prior to that, the mission was being studied, and ESA and NASA could involve scientists on an informal basis in the studies, but once the mission becomes official, scientists have to actually compete to get on the mission. Some well-known experts on Titan who I know didn’t get on that mission, and my career would have been totally different if I had not gotten selected.

But I did get selected, and I was later selected as well for the radar team, and I was also selected as part of the team for one of the probe instruments. So three different responsibilities. It involves a lot of travel, a lot of learning about mission planning. Just by going through that bottleneck, that narrowest point in the hourglass of getting selected for Cassini, it opened up a whole lot of things.

The launch was in ’97. It arrived at Saturn in 2004, in July, and that was just about 21 years after my first contact with the scientists planning Cassini. Now we’ve got just floods of data. The probe worked as it was supposed to. It was a real risky part of the mission but it worked. We’re getting lots of radar data; I don’t have time to work on all the data I’d like to. We’ve got several other people at LPL with major instrument responsibilities. In spite of all the attention that’s given to Mars, I’d often like to think that Cassini was an important, formative experience for this laboratory.

For the probe mission, as an Interdisciplinary Scientist, I could float around as instruments got their data back from the probe mission. I made sure I was in the porta-cabin where the imaging data came back. That was probably the most emotionally intense of those experiences, because the imaging data were received on the ground. There was a two hour period while those data packets were extracted from other kinds of data that came back from the probe in the same stream and then sent to the porta-cabin where Marty Tomasko’s camera team was located.

Once the data was on their computer, their software converted these to images, and the images were first displayed as a set of 300 thumbnails. That was the way Bashar Rizk, who was the guy in front of the computer consul, was displaying them—one second per image. So for about five minutes you looked at these 300 images, not in descent order. They were in random order, so you could see flashes of things on these thumbnails that looked like something you couldn’t recognize and then a river channel would pop up, and then something you couldn’t recognize and then a fracture would pop up. It was such a bizarre way to see these. Here were the first close-up images of Titan and the last close-up images that we’ll probably see for 20 years, all in that five minute period. That was very intense; there was a lot of screaming in that room and I was one of the people screaming.

Alfred McEwen

My major project right now is called HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter [MRO]. I’m the Principal Investigator of that. LPL is a good place to be a Principal Investigator of instruments, and whole missions, in fact, these days.

I have co-investigators at a dozen different institutions—more than that, now—scattered around the country and in Switzerland, for one. There are various elements to the operation and the software development, some of which is being done at other institutions. I have to coordinate all that, although my formula for being a successful PI is to hire good people and make yourself completely dispensable in all areas, if possible.

I had a lot of experience with the active parts of missions, but none at all with the part of building instruments. There was a fellow at Ball Aerospace named Alan Delamere, who I got to know on a proposal for a global orbiter. He builds instruments and particularly comes up with concepts for instruments.

He needed a PI, and he called me up and asked me if I wanted to do it. It was a surprise to me. I went away and thought about it for a while, but I finally decided if I didn’t do it I’d be kicking myself forever, so I had to do it.

MRO is an orbiter, in a polar orbit. It goes around Mars about thirteen times a day. This is a big spacecraft. The two previous—three previous, including the Europeans’—successful Mars orbiters have been much smaller spacecraft. This one is quite a bit bigger and more capable, in order to carry big instruments like HiRISE, which is 65 kilograms.

It also has a very large high-gain antennae, three meters in diameter, which means we can send back lots of data, which is essential for missions like HiRISE. It’s got a big solar array, so there’s lots of power. There are other instruments, there’s lots of data rate, so it’s a very capable instrument. Months ago, MRO had already returned more Mars data than all the previous Mars missions combined.

It’s a huge amount of data, and it’s very high-quality data for science. It doesn’t get the attention from the news people as the landers and rovers, because people relate to those. But for the science community, this is really the scientist’s mission.

To me, that most exciting moment was getting our very first images in-flight—pictures of the Moon and of some stars. They’re not that exciting images—we were a long ways away from the Moon—but I knew what it meant. I knew that it meant our camera was working. 

Robert Strom

We launched our second mission to Mercury, an orbiter, in 2004. So about a 31-year hiatus [since Mariner 10].  I never thought that would happen. I’m involved with the MESSENGER mission which is on its way.  I’m just hoping I live long enough to see it go into orbit. We’ve only seen 45% of the surface, so 55% is unknown territory. We’re going to go back and image that and see what’s there, so there’s a lot to find out about Mercury.  In fact, it’s the least known planet in the solar system. I want to see the rest of Mercury before I die. I do want to see that, because I’ve been waiting for over 30 years to see the other part of it.

Editor’s Note: MESSENGER completed its first flyby of Mercury on January 14, 2008. It will orbit the planet in 2011. Dr. Robert Strom recalled his first glimpse of Mercury’s far side on Arizona Illustrated on March 12, 2008: “I got tears in my eyes. That first look—after waiting so long—it was very, very emotional. This is a whole new planet. We have to look at the whole thing again.” 

William Boynton

The mission I’m associated with mostly now, the Mars Odyssey mission, was one where we finally got to send the gamma ray spectrometer back to Mars that didn’t make it because the first one [Mars Observer] blew up. In this case, they actually said that if I thought I could build a better instrument than Martin-Marietta—which was now called Lockheed-Martin—then I could go ahead and build my own design. In fact we came up with what turned out to be a much better design, and we built it ourselves, right here across the hall in this lab in Tucson.

It was a pretty elaborate project but we got a darn good instrument out of it, and made some interesting discoveries. We discovered vast quantities of ice buried just beneath the surface that nobody knew was there. Some people suspected there might be a small amount of ice just filling the pore space between the sand grains, but what we found was that it was mostly ice with just a little bit of dirt mixed in with it, rather than the other way around. That really changed people’s thinking about Mars.

We also found some interesting things going on with the atmosphere. One of the people working with me, Ann Sprague, was looking at the argon data. Argon is a rare gas that’s in the atmosphere but it doesn’t condense out at low temperatures, whereas the carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere does condense out at low temperatures, and that’s what makes the seasonal frost that happens in the wintertime there.

What she found is that the argon was being enriched over the poles in the wintertime, because a significant fraction of the atmosphere would move toward the winter pole, and the CO2 would condense out, and more atmosphere would come to replace it, and every time more atmosphere comes to replace it, it brings with it more argon. But the argon doesn’t condense out so we were just building up a concentration of that argon.

I looked into the data to see that, indeed, it looked like that was happening, but Ann, who’s got more background in studying atmospheres, looked at the data and she’s been processing it and found out that it’s really telling us interesting things about the motion of the atmosphere on Mars.

Originally when the instrument was proposed, it was thought it was going to be mostly a geochemical instrument mapping the elements over most of the planet. But it turned out I think probably the discovery of the ice and looking at what goes on with the argon in the atmosphere—it’s been surprising that the instruments turned out to be probably as valuable or maybe even more so in ways that we didn’t even contemplate or proposed. I think the fact that we discovered ice in the polar regions probably helped NASA decide that we really need to go with the Phoenix mission, which is going to go to this polar area.

William Boynton

I was involved in a mission called Mars Polar Lander that was supposed to land in 1999 in the south polar region of Mars. I built an instrument for that very similar to the TEGA instrument that we’re building for Phoenix—in fact it had the same name. At the time that mission was proposed, nobody knew about this ice beneath the surface, but by the time we got around to proposing for the Phoenix mission, [Mars Odyssey] had discovered this ice not much before that. It really got an awful lot of interest both from the public and from the scientific community.

I think that helped NASA make that selection, because we were proposing to fly the exact same kind of lander that crashed in 1999. NASA was clearly reluctant to fly that same lander again. But enough people studied the 1999 event that they were pretty sure they’d figured out what went wrong, and they solved that problem, and we made the case that probably no spacecraft has been looked at in more detail than this one we’re proposing because of all of the studies on why it crashed and so on and so forth. In the end NASA decided to go with the Phoenix mission. A lot of people have suggested that the discovery of the ice probably really helped NASA make that decision.

Peter Smith

In 2002, two things happened. One, we were thrashing around trying to figure out if we could use the ’01 spacecraft which had been sitting in a box at Lockheed-Martin, and if so, what could we use it for. What instruments should we include, and what would its scientific goals be? We were looking for a low-cost solution to the Scout dilemma of providing new, exciting science within a cost cap.

The Phoenix mission is shaped like a tabletop with an arm, with some instruments and a weather station—that’s it. You can’t put wheels on it, and you can’t do other daring things, because you want to keep the cost low.

At just the time we were thinking about how use the ’01 spacecraft, Boynton announced that there was ice under the soil of the polar regions. Big coincidence. To me, that was it. NASA’s theme is follow the water, and no spacecraft had ever gotten anywhere close to water. Where they had landed, there hadn’t been water for three billion years.

I thought, here’s a chance: You could just land anywhere in the polar region, and ice is under you. You don’t need wheels. Our mission is vertical. Phoenix is looking at what’s happening today. Ice is not ancient. We want to look at modern structures and modern processes. Is there any chance the ice did melt, and if so, was there biology? All of a sudden, it clicked. I’ve been awfully lucky.  Things have clicked several times for me. You’re lucky enough to have that happen once or twice in your life.

We really worked hard to win that proposal. Of course we did win, because here we are in the midst of the mission. When we wrote the proposal, one thing I insisted on against tremendous resistance was doing the operations here. That’s why we got this building [the Phoenix Science Operations Center]. I convinced the University to agree to provide us space. My feeling was the science expertise is at the universities. The students are here. We’ve got access to all kinds of resources that scientists need.

Michael Drake

I think winning the Phoenix project was perhaps the biggest excitement, in part because it’s the first time a major space mission has been controlled by a University once it’s on the surface of the planet. It clearly has had a very large impact, from a public perception point of view, on the University of Arizona—in fact the University is marketing itself world-wide around the Mars Phoenix mission, simply because we’re going to have an international press pull here. It’s a great opportunity.