Two events this week –one happy and one sad– remind me of how many great discoveries have come from radio astronomy, a field of surpassing contributions that is barely known to the general public.

The happy event- a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which ends today, June 21, in Charlottesville, VA. The sad event- the death of Kenneth Franklin, who with a single co-worker, made one of the spectacular early findings in radio astronomy — the entirely unexpected 1955 discovery that powerful bursts of radio waves come from the planet Jupiter. Ken died at age 84 in Colorado Monday night, June 18, the day the conference opened in Virginia.

Hubble Space Telescope gets the lion’s share of astronomy publicity and I’m not taking anything away from Hubble and NASA- it’s been arguably the single most important telescope in astronomy since old Galileo started telescopic viewing all almost 400 years ago.

But while “Hubble” is a household word, how many folks know that radio telescopes gave us all these great discoveries?

**The first known planets beyond the solar system (planets of the pulsar PSR B1257+12 in Virgo, found in 1991, four years before Swiss astronomers found the first planet of an ordinary sunlike star.

**Pulsars themselves, discovered in 1967, which turned out to be the neutron stars theorized to exist in the 1930s by several visionary astronomers and physicists including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who later built the atomic bomb.

**Quasars, discovered in the early 1960s, which turned out to be nothing less than supermassive black holes, millions to billions times more massive than the “ordinary” stellar-mass black holes which had been theorized earlier, but which were not discovered until much latter. Optical telescopes were needed to figure out what quasars were, but their very existence was revealed by radio astronomy.

**And how about this one from the old Bell Telephone Laboratories? The discovery of the cosmic background radiation, the glow from the Big Bang. Two radio astronomers shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for that baby and two others shared the 2006 Noble Prize recently for sophisticated measurements of the glow made with NASA’s COBE satellite. (See my earlier blog on “The Story Behind the Nobel Prize.”)

*The first observations of good –if indirect– evidence for the existence of gravitational radiation, as predicted from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. That earned the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for a pair of radio astronomers. They were cited “for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation.” And then there was the 1974 Nobel Prize, split between a radio astronomer who invented new methods of observation and another who was involved in the discovery of pulsars in the first place.

**The structure of our Milky Way Galaxy was not known in any great detail before radio astronomers began observing the radio emissions of hydrogen in interstellar space at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. Doppler shifts of the hydrogen radiation showed how fast various parts of the Milky Way are turning and allowed astronomers to map the space locations of the various spiral arms of the Galaxy. That’s one of the more esoteric contributions of radio astronomy, but one appreciated and honored by all astronomers who know their stuff.

**Radio astronomy has revealed dozens of molecules in interstellar space, containing up to 13 atoms apiece, according to NRAO radio astronomer, Claire Chandler, who spoke at a press conference in Charlottesville on June 18. These findings include some of the chemical building blocks of life as we know it. Another of the molecules studied by radio astronomy, carbon monoxide, is noxious on Earth, but a blessing in space. It acts as a tracer of the cold and dark giant molecular clouds in whose inky depths stars are born, around which planets form.

Besides the above discoveries and hundreds of others, don’t forget that radio astronomy is the principal base of that single form of space research that most excites the imagination of people worldwide — SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Remember Contact, the 1997 movie version of a Carl Sagan novel, in which Jodie Foster attempted contact with aliens? In early scenes, she worked with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s “Very Large Array,” the Y-shaped set of big dish antennas on the Plains of San Agustin in New Mexico. Then her efforts shifted to another great radio telescope, the 1000-foot great bowl at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It’s now clear that there are millions of planetary systems throughout our Galaxy. Some must be inhabited and one day we will hear from one of them.

At the conference in Charlottesville on Monday, I shook hands with Frank Drake, author of the famous Drake Equation about the probability of contacting interstellar civilizations. He began the serious SETI efforts in 1960 with an antenna at the NRAO’s facility in Green Bank, West Virginia. And I saw many other pioneers, including Robert Wilson, who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and Bernard Burke, the co-discoverer with Kenneth Franklin in 1955 of the radio bursts from Jupiter. I think all the living past and present directors of the NRAO were there, and I managed to greet all of them too.

These pioneers, and hundreds of other radio astronomers around the world, some living and some now long gone, deserve our thanks for opening up a huge new window on the Universe that has enriched our knowledge so tremendously.

In just five years time, two of the most powerful facilities in radio astronomy history should be completed, ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, at very high altitude in Chile amidst the driest desert on Earth) and EVLA (Extended Very Large Array, which takes the New Mexico telescope to new heights of sensitivity through the installation of modern electronics as a major technological upgrade). I hope to be around to share in the excitement as they reveal much that is as yet unknown about the Universe.

Astronomers are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the appearance of Supernova 1987A this week. 

As I write this, they’ve just cut the cake at a hundred-scientist commemoration of the event in Aspen, Co, and space agencies have posted gorgeous portraits of the remains of the mighty star on the WWW.  NASA’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope, is at

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/10

And ESA’s image, from the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, can be seen at http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMPE0CE8YE_index_0.html

The talk at the Aspen conference is mostly on  knowledge gained from SN 1987A, the brightest supernova since the invention of the telescope and the first visible to the naked eye in four centuries. 

But for me, the anniversary triggers memories of crazy things that went on shortly after February 24, 1987, when the exploding star was discovered in Chile and all Hell broke out at science agencies and university centers as astronomers and physicists scrambled to observe the once-in-many-lifetimes event like fighter pilots alerted to a radar bogey approaching the continental US during the Cold War.  The physicists were galvanized by the discovery of neutrinos from the stellar collapse that triggered the explosion.  The neutrinos were detected in underground labs on February 23, before light from the supernova arrived.

Supernova Memories

I first heard of Supernova 1987A when a crowd gathered around the soda machine just outside my then-office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.  Word of the discovery had just come in, and I overheard them passing the news around.   

Later, after I had flown to Chile, met the young Canadian discoverer of the supernova and seen it myself from a hotel balcony, I wrote an account for Smithsonian magazine, which sent me there.  This was all done on vacation time and on nights and weekends, with written approval from the Space Agency for such “outside activity” of a business nature.

The magazine is published and before you know it a NASA lawyer calls me.  “You used inside information in Smithsonian magazine,” he accused (or words to that effect).  I couldn’t imagine what he meant — I hadn’t divulged the slightest secret, I didn’t even know any secret.   It turned out that my offense consisted of mentioning in the magazine that I learned of the supernova by overhearing a crowd at the Coke machine. 

According to the legal eagle, if I didn’t work for NASA, I wouldn’t have overheard the office gossip and thus couldn’t have told the anecdote in print.  Allegedly, I was improperly profiting from “information gained in an official capacity.”  Nowadays, NASA lawyers have more to worry about.  At least they didn’t transfer me to the tracking station on Guam, force me to deny the Big Bang and Global Warming, or refer my case to the Federal courts.

Meanwhile, astronomers from such places as Penn State, Columbia University, NASA Goddard and what was then West Germany were cobbling together payloads and heading to test ranges in the Australian outback, to launch sounding rockets in search of X-rays from the supernova and balloon instruments to detect gamma rays.  Some experiments were successful, but there were problems, as I was told by a young Pennsylvania physicist who participated.  There are all kinds of kangaroos around, he said, and they’re not on the NASA team.  The worst were a certain species of little ones.  At night you didn’t see them until they hopped in front of your speeding car on a dark desert road and burst apart on impact like a bomb.  It was much more distressing than the average encounter with a deer or a skunk while driving in the USA – especially for the kangaroos.

One fellow who went down to launch an instrument on short notice was accustomed to eating Kosher food.   Since you might not find a wide selection of that fine cuisine near the Woomera rocket range, he brought along a big package of New York corned beef to tide him over.  I think it was packed in dry ice and in any case it was in his carry-on luggage all the way from the eastern United States to landfall in Australia. All this while, the dry ice would have been dwindling away.  Once in Australia, the traveler had to proceed toward Woomera in a very small commercial plane that made intermediate stops on the desert, like a puddle jumper without many puddles.  There’s just no carry-on luggage possible in this little plane – everything must be checked.  You’ve guessed the rest- the corned beef was inadvertently unloaded at an intermediate stop and its loss not discovered until the traveler reached his destination.  Whether he actually asked the airline “Where’s the beef?” is unknown.  The rocket payload may have been successful, but one of the operators probably lost his appetite for foreign travel.

Those weren’t the only problems.  In early July, 1987, the Sydney correspondent of Nature magazine, Charles Morgan, filed a story headlined “Aborigines halt Woomer teams’ supernova observations.”  According to Charles, the Maralinga Tjarutja people were denying access to part of the land where payloads might land, which could prevent scientists from recovering their equipment after a rocket flight.  I think that blew over, because lots of good measurements were made. 

I haven’t even gotten to the once-famous and now largely forgotten Mystery Spot that seemed to shoot out of  Supernova 1987A, nor how the historic audio tapes of the Spot’s discovery were lost forever in checked baggage on an airline.  (Doesn’t anyone ever learn?  Shouldn’t they heave learned from the case of the missing corned beef?)  And some day we must tell the tale of the pulsar in the supernova that has been “discovered” more than once and “disproved” each time it was “found.”  They are going to look for it with the Hubble Space Telescope after a new camera is installed in the next servicing mission, and I hope that whether they find it or not, everyone agrees on the results.  We’ll save all this for a future blog, if you want to hear it.

Meanwhile, if you want to learn more about Supernova 1987A, I recommend Laurence Marschall’s “The Supernova Story,” now out in paperback, which is as close as we’ve got to an authorized biography. 
 

On October 3, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Mather and George Smoot, scientists who explored the background glow from the Big Bang with NASA’s COBE satellite.  Mather led the total COBE effort and his own instrument on the satellite measured the spectrum of the glow so precisely that when he first projected the results at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, a large audience of academics interrupted the talk with a rare and sustained burst of heavy applause:  the measurements fit the theoretical curve so precisely that the errors in the data were smaller than the thickness of the line.  At a single glance, this conclusively ruled out prior data that suggested that part of the background glow came from cosmic events in eras long after the Big Bang.  Smoot’s findings, unveiled with great fanfare at a subsequent session of the American Physical Society, presented the first evidence of the earliest structures in the universe, regions that were hotter or cooler, denser or thinner than each other, long before a single star or galaxy had formed.

The media reports that I’ve seen told about these scientific discoveries that earned the Prize, but gave little hint of the scientific and engineering Odyssey that brought home the primeval bacon.

Did you know

That the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) project was born in a New York City building that is pictured in nearly every episode of the television comedy Seinfeld?

That COBE was built for launch on the Space Shuttle, and that after the Challenger catastrophe, the satellite had to be re-engineered and downsized, including the removal of  tons of hardware–  for launch on an unmanned Delta rocket?

That besides these two Prize-winners there were about 1500 people who helped design, manufacture, and operate COBE and analyze its findings, without whom the Prize-winning discoveries would not have been made?

That concerning this Nobel Prize, I was right for a change?

The Seinfeld Connection

In 1974, Mather was a young post-doc with Patrick Thaddeus, an expert on the interstellar molecules at a NASA facility in Manhattan who previously had studied the effects of the Big Bang glow –called the microwave background radiation- on molecules in the Milky Way.   When word came that NASA Headquarters would be issuing a call for proposals for new scientific satellites, with an emphasis on infrared astronomy, Thaddeus urged Mather to put a team together and propose a satellite.

The building where Mather and Thaddeus worked, and where six scientists from around the USA came together to make the first plan for COBE, is located at Broadway and West 112th Street. The Broadway side of the building is occupied at street level by Tom’s Restaurant, a curious New York institution whose cuisine may be an acquired taste.  Exterior shots of Tom’s are used on Seinfeld to introduce segments in which Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer huddle over coffee in what they call “Monk’s.”

Imagine if Larry David, the head writer for Seinfeld, had known what was going on upstairs from “Monk’s.”  We might have enjoyed a segment in which George posed as an experimental cosmologist for NASA just as in one episode, he pretended to be a marine biologist to impress a date.  Most likely, it would have ended with a rocket inadvertently launched toward the Bronx rather than to outer space.

COBE and the Space Shuttle -

While COBE was under construction at Goddard Space Flight Center, Mather published a 20-page, four-color brochure about the mission.  Unfortunately, his opening sentence proclaimed that COBE “will be launched from the Space Shuttle…” which turned out to be wrong.  After the Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA changed the rules for Shuttles in an attempt to cut risk.   In particular, the agency eliminated the option for launching Shuttles from the West Coast.  This had a huge impact on the COBE project:  COBE needed to be inserted in a carefully designed orbit at very high inclination to the Earth’s equator, so that it could steadily scan the universe while its deliberately cold detectors would never point near the Sun.  To reach the required orbit from a US launch site, COBE had to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base where “Space Launch Complex 6” had been modified to accommodate the Space Shuttle.  So there you are:  COBE was designed and built to launch on the Shuttle, COBE had to launch from Vandenberg to reach a suitable orbit, and now no Shuttle would ever go up from Vandenberg.  Mather and the team were in a heap of trouble.

To launch from Vandenberg without the aid of the Space Shuttle, COBE had to fit on an expendable rocket.  As Mather recalled in a 1994 talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, his team had to re-engineer the satellite to “cut the weight by half.”  A large, sunshade, mounted in a fixed position on the spacecraft, was replaced with one that folded to fit within the shroud of a Delta rocket, then deployed in space.  And, as a key COBE scientist recently reminded me, the redesigned, much smaller and lighter satellite had to be toughened as well.  The Space Shuttle gives you a softer ride than a Delta, because the Shuttle carries people – it’s man-rated.  COBE engineers had designed the satellite to the Shuttle launch environment; as first built, it was vulnerable –particularly in one of the delicate scientific instruments- to the harsher vibrations of an unmanned Delta.  And of course, while you made COBE smaller, lighter, and stronger, you also had to preserve the scientific performance specs of the three onboard instruments.  No use putting up a satellite that fit in the rocket , survived the launch, and reached the proper orbit if it would now be too small to detect much.  That would be like launching a six-inch telescope and calling it “Hubble.”  Easy, but not  too useful.

As the award of the Prize reminds us, all these modifications were made successfully – COBE worked like a charm, made measurements of exquisite precision, and led to Nobel-class discoveries.  In my view, the re-engineering of COBE and its successful operations represent NASA at its best (some would say, the “old NASA’).  The degree of difficulty wasn’t quite up to sending Man to the Moon and back, or the first focus-fixing repair of the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, but it was great work, done just right.

Critical COBE Scientists

Mather estimated that about 1500 people worked on COBE.  Most of them were engineers and technicians and managers and administrative personnel of all sorts.  But about 20 were science team members and I have had the opportunity at one time or another to meet them all.  I want to single out a few among many who deserve praise.  For years, I sat just three or four doors down the hall from John Mather at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and for much of that time, George Smoot, although employed at the University of California, Berkeley, had a long-term visitor’s office not much further away. Smoot’s instrument, like all of COBE, was built at Goddard.   Smoot had to pass my door to reach Mather’s office and he often stopped in to shoot the breeze.

My boss at the time was Michael Hauser, who was also the third of the three top scientists of COBE.  (COBE was loaded with Mather’s “Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer,” Smoot’s “Differential Microwave Radiometers,” and Hauser’s “Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment.”)  Mike Hauser’s instrument worked splendidly, and went on gathering data even after the other two instruments stopped when the onboard supply of liquid helium coolant ran out.  His instrument didn’t gather new facts on the Big Bang, but detected the infrared background radiation that was emitted over the whole subsequent history of the universe, originating in all the stars and galaxies that are or ever were.  This too was a fine accomplishment.

Charles “Chuck” Bennett, now a Johns Hopkins Professor, was a Goddard scientist who was Deputy Principal Investigator on Smoot’s experiment, and critical to the program.  David Wilkinson, a Princeton University physicist, was a COBE scientist from Day 1 – he participated in the original six-person meeting at 2880 Broadway, continued to contribute during the whole duration of the project, and went on to work with Bennett in developing NASA’s WMAP satellite, a follow-on to COBE that has earned equal acclaim from the scientific community.  WMAP stands for Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe because sadly, Wilkinson died in 2002 while that spacecraft was under development at Goddard.

Nancy Boggess, now retired, is an astronomer and manager with terrific instincts, rare social and political skills, and intense determination.  She kept the scientists working together at Goddard to meet project objectives and above all, thanks to her years of previous experience as the person who fostered the infrared astronomy program at NASA Headquarters, she had the street smarts to get COBE what it needed from NASA, while keeping Headquarters administrators, politicians, micro-managers and other well-meaning meddlers with every sort of policy agenda off the backs of the team.

What’s missing in the above  kudos is the list of engineers and other key personnel who helped build, calibrate, and test COBE. The two chief engineers were Roger Mattson and Dennis McCarthy.  I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable to name others, but I am reminded of how an elderly engineering professor verbally roughed me up at a meeting of the National Academy of Engineering.  At the meeting, I spoke about how astronomers have learned to publicize our discoveries to share them with the public and encourage continued support of space science.  In the question period, the old gentleman creaked to his feet and reminded me angrily that no astronomer ever built a space probe that went to Jupiter or a satellite that gathered great data like COBE or that made marvelous images like those from Hubble.  “Everything is built by the engineers,” he said, “but the astronomers get all the publicity.”

So let’s hear it for the COBE engineers!

How I was right for a change

When the discovery of the microwave background radiation was first announced and attributed to the Big Bang, I told friends and colleagues that I thought the work was wrong.  Of course, it was right, and was later recognized with one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1978, awarded to Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the Bell Telephone Laboratories (a Russian got the other half for low-temperature research).

When George Smoot announced his findings at an American Physical Society meeting on April 23, 1992, the Washington Post waxed rhapsodic, editorializing that “Science had one of its magical moments Friday, suddenly producing definitive evidence for the wacky, spooky, altogether hard-to-credit birth-of-the-universe scenario called the Big Bang Theory.”  The Post and other national newspapers also quoted me as saying that this work would earn a Nobel Prize. So as my wife says, I was right for once.  Just once.

I missed the meeting in Prague where astronomers stripped Pluto of its planetary status. In fact, I’ve skipped every one of the every-three-years General Assemblies of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) –with one exception- during the several decades that I’ve been an IAU member because the Assemblies were just no fun. (The exception, when I attended in 1988, reinforced my conviction that there are better things to do.)

If you are going away for two weeks in August, I say hit the mountains or the beach, not the IAU General Assembly.

To some US astronomers, the main reason to attend the IAU during the Cold War was to meet Eastern Bloc astronomers who –especially before Stalin died- were rarely permitted to travel abroad, but who were sent to represent their nations at the General Assembly.

A General Assembly of astronomers is not a fun bunch – during the big speeches, there’s nothing to do but sit and listen, take good notes or take a nap. A lot like college, but without sports.

All that went by the boards this past week, as 2500 astronomers met in Prague. They haggled vociferously over the definition of “planet.” They held up cards to signify their votes, like pre-approved bidders at an auction of modern art. They rebelled against the unanimous recommendation of a committee of wise elders, and slogged out a new and complex planet definition in real time, through uproarious sessions, described by a pal on the scene as “Astronomers Behaving Badly.”

Less than a third of IAU’s members actually came to Prague -just 2500 give or take- and by the end of the meeting when the Pluto decisions were taken, only a fraction of those were present and voting. By all accounts, a tough gang of solar system experts prevailed to dump Pluto from the planetary ranks. But, as the media report, other astronomers say that they have just begun to fight.

Well this sounds more like fun. It reminds me of one of those old-time Democratic or Republican party conventions where the convention actually chose the Presidental nominee of the party through dealing and doubledealing in smokefilled rooms and in cliff-hanging polls of all the delegations. At those conventions, every delegate got a chance at a microphone to blurt out unscripted remarks, however self-serving and inappropriate. As a kid, I watched those conventions on a big black and white TV with a tiny screen and I really enjoyed them.

So when the IAU next meets, in Rio in August 2009, I will be there. Ready to wheel and deal and to vote.