Early Graduate Students
Early Graduate StudentsWilliam Hartmann
I was looking for someplace where you could do planetary science, and there basically were very few places in the country. There was Harold Urey, there was Gerard Kuiper, there was Fred Whipple—Urey at UCSD I guess at that time, and then Whipple at Harvard. I applied and came out here, and thought that was really exciting.
I was at Steward Observatory as an astronomy graduate student with most of my classes there, and across the campus was LPL, in the PMM building, and I had my assistantship and office there. There was Dale Cruikshank, there was Alan Binder, there was Toby Owen who was a year or two ahead of us. But what courses could we take? In astronomy we were studying stellar interiors and stellar atmospheres and so forth—not planets. So Dale and Al and I got involved with the Geology Department.
Spencer Titley was on the faculty in geology. He was already working with the Flagstaff group of Gene Shoemaker. That group was the predecessor of, or maybe it already was, the Astrogeology Group in the in U.S. Geological Survey, which is still in Flagstaff. Certainly in Arizona at the time, those were the two big centers. Kuiper and Shoemaker were already carving out groups to study the surface of the Moon when I arrived in June of ’61.
My job in the assistantship was making these rectified photographs of the Moon, and doing a lot of work in the darkroom—which, incidentally, was a nice little highlight to arriving in Arizona in the summer, because the darkroom was always 68 degrees.
Titley, in the Geology Department, took us under his wing. He really did a wonderful thing. Cruikshank and Binder and myself, he took the three of us on, on kind of a crash program of petrology and mineralogy and so on. He took us out on some field trips—I remember we all packed into some vehicle and went off to some mine that he was showing us in the Whetstone Mountains.
Alan Binder
Spencer Titley was an economic geologist, and he wanted to be in the Space Program. He wanted to get into the Gemini program; had a big portfolio of letters to NASA saying scientists should be involved. He was involved with Gene Shoemaker at the United States Geological Survey in terms of the stratigraphic mapping they were doing.
Well, Kuiper had zero interest in students. We were on our own. He would not help us in any way. We were there to work in the Lunar Lab and be his assistants, although we learned a lot of stuff so it’s not all that bad. Although I must point out that the first semester as a graduate student, I was observing at McDonald Observatory for two weeks with Kuiper during final exams, so I had to take my final exams early, and his attitude was, “Well, just tell your professors to give you an A.” But I was supposed to walk up and say, “I’ve got to go observe with Kuiper, give me an A”? It doesn’t work that way.
So we were on our own. Spence said, “Hey, come on over to the Geology Department, take whatever courses you need, and I’ll help you get the basics of geology”—because we had no geology, of course. What I was studying, trying to, was what we now call planetary science. There are degrees now. In those days, there were no degrees, it was all: What on earth are we supposed to study? What are we going to need to do this work? It was clear we needed geology of some kind.
You probably know, Kuiper had written a series of books—Barbara Middlehurst edited the latter of those—but he had written The Earth as a Planet. He understood that the study of the planets was not astronomy anymore. Clearly one had to understand geology and geophysics and so forth and so on. I had come to that conclusion too.
So it moved in this direction, but in the beginning it was very confusing as to what we were supposed to do and how we were supposed to get educated.
Spencer Titley
The students came to me. We did not have any kind of program in what they wanted. As I recall them telling me, they were brought here by Kuiper, with the understanding that they would be able to get a degree of some sort in planetary science or astronomy or whatever. They were a mix of physics and electronics and Russian and astronomy combined minors or majors, and there were three of them: Bill Hartmann, Dale Cruikshank and Alan Binder. I agreed to take them on.
There was a coincidence of these three fellows coming in and my involvement with the U.S. Geological Survey on this new, exciting thing with lunar mapping, lunar geology. I hand-tooled them, in a sense. We had special courses, and I tried to take physicists and astronomers and turn them into geologists—fairly successfully, I think, because they were bright people. That was simply how the program worked. Along the way, others from the Survey came in; others unrelated to the Lunar Lab. I had nothing to do with the Lunar Lab, and Kuiper never spoke one word to me about the program.
I combined lunar mapping and these projects with what these fellows were doing. I set up courses—one course, chiefly, plus seminars that they attended—and they were open to outside students. It wasn’t until about 1972 that the Department of Planetary Sciences formed.
Alan Binder
We used to go out on field trips: We’d go down to the Pinacates two or three times a year, and up to Flagstaff. It was just a small group of guys. We all had the same interests, and we all wanted to learn about craters and volcanoes. Spence Titley would take us out on field trips to try to help us get caught up. I definitely wanted to be an Apollo astronaut. Bill I don’t think really cared, Dale didn’t care about that so much, but I wanted to explore, I wanted to get my feet on the ground.
Charles Wood
Kuiper had done a lunar atlas that he had published just when he was leaving Yerkes in 1960. It’s a big red cardboard box, must be about two feet by a foot-and-a-half wide, full of large pictures of the Moon. We used those atlas sheets to compile a catalogue of the craters on the Moon, on the near side of the Moon.
I think most of the other people were not students. Some were students and some were people who were hired just to do that all day; Dai Arthur, David William. Dai Arthur is one of the Brits that Kuiper brought over. A couple hours a day after classes I would go and use rulers and measure these craters. It was before computers were widely available; certainly no personal computers had been invented. So we used these old-fashioned adding machines and calculating machines, where to multiply you would key in the numbers, like in a cash register, and then you’d pull a crank multiple times and it would chug, chug, chug, and finally multiply two numbers together.
I did that for four years. I worked my way through school as an undergraduate by measuring craters on the Moon. And the fascinating thing about that is, I still like the Moon. By looking at every single crater that we measured—I was the person who looked at all of them to make sure it was consistent—I really learned the Moon very well. It’s been really a fascination that’s kept going for me for a long time.
Early Graduate Students, Page 2
Early Graduate Students, Page 2Floyd 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.