CU physics lab marks 70year journey in space
BOULDER» Ten years before there was NASA, a collection of ambitious scientists at the University of Colorado clustered at the physics building were pioneering studies of Earth’s upper atmosphere with the use of V2 rockets under the auspices of the aptly named Upper Air Lab.
Daniel Baker, director of CU’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, recalled an amusing cartoon drawn many years ago by George Gamow, the Russianborn theoretical physicist and cosmologist who ended his remarkable career at CU, highlighting how crowded the physics department was becoming. Gamow sent it to the university president’s office with a note cautioning, “It’s going to get worse.”
In fact, it got better. Much better.
The Upper Air Lab, born in 1948 and fueled by an early $69,000 grant, evolved into LASP in about 1960, and the rest is a history in which bold new chapters are still being written at a dizzying pace.
“I think it is an amazing story and one all folks in Boulder and on the Front Range and Colorado can be proud of. We hope to celebrate that in a very effective and inclusive way,” Baker said before Friday’s 70th anniversary celebration.
“I think the opportunities that unfold before us are virtually unlimited,” Baker said. “We see that there are so many new opportunities, not only to study the Earth and its environment and our solar system but looking around to planets and other stars.”
CU chancellor Philip DiStefano said, “Thanks in large part to the hard work of scientists and engineers at LASP, research begun here at CUBoulder has traveled to all eight planets in the solar system, plus Pluto,” the only research institution that can make that claim. “It’s exciting to think about what LASP will accomplish in the next 70 years.”
LASP has been on a roll in recent years, with headlinegrabbing involvement in the MAVEN mission to Mars, the New Horizons flyby of Pluto, the CassiniHuygens probe of the Saturn system and the Kepler and K2 missions exploring thousands of planets orbiting other distant stars to name but a few.
“Never been tempted to leave”
Bill McClintock claims the title of the longesttenured, continually employed LASPian, having started there in 1977. He credits previous longtime director Charles Barth, who died in 2014, the current leadership of Baker, and also the support of the university administration at large for enabling LASP to reach the heights it has attained.
“They had, again, the foresight and the vision to really develop the engineering infrastructure that it takes to do a NASA mission today,” McClintock said. “It requires a lot more infrastructure now than it did 20 years ago, enormously more.
“I have to say largely the way they have done that is to make sure the laboratory is absolutely worldclass, and then they have stayed out of the way of their leadership and then let them do their jobs.”
The current main job for McClintock, a senior research scientist, is leading the instrument development on NASA’s GOLD (Globalscale Observations of the Limb and Disk) mission under principal investigator Richard Eastes of LASP — the first time NASA instrumentation has been hosted on a commercial satellite. It’s also the first mission to study the daytoday weather of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the overlapping thermosphere and the ionosphere, rather than just its longterm climate.
Despite now being 72 years old, McClintock remains excited about going to work each day; the team just last week finished commissioning the instruments on board GOLD, which launched in January. Initial data is just now rolling in.
“I’ve never been tempted to leave,” McClintock said. “This place is small enough. It does the whole thing. We write the proposals, we build the instrumentation, we fly it, we operate it, we get the data and we publish the results, all in this relatively small operation. And I get to do everything. If I was working at a major place like (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) or an aerospace company, I might have a satisfying job, but it would be much more specific.”
“All MAVEN all the time”
Bruce Jakosky doesn’t quite match McClintock in tenure, but he is not far behind. He is in his 36th year of service. Jakosky, 62, is principal investigator on the MAVEN mission (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN), which entered the Mars orbit in September 2014 to conduct a continuing study of the red planet’s upper atmosphere.
“All MAVEN, all the time,” Jakosky said of his current assignment. “MAVEN is still orbiting, and it’s still doing great science. Life is good.”
Jakosky thumbnailed MAVEN’s success as showing “that the loss of atmospheric gas to space has been a major process in the evolution of its atmosphere and the changing climate.”
He added, “It will orbit for a long time. We have enough fuel to keep it operating it through about 2030, and so that’s a ways off.”
Another ongoing mission of which LASP claims a significant piece is the historic July 14, 2015, New Horizons flyby of Pluto, led by Alan Stern of Boulder’s Southwest Research Institute, which carried as part of its instrument package the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, built and operated with the contributions of as many 30 students at LASP, grad students and undergrads alike. The instrument’s purpose was to measure the dust particles encountered between the planets as New Horizons made its nineyear, 3billionmile journey to Pluto — and now, beyond.
“The Student Dust Counter aboard New Horizons is historic. It’s not only the most distantly traveled dust counter instrument in history, but it’s also the firstever studentbuilt instrument to ever fly on a NASA mission to the planets,” Stern wrote in an email.
Mihaly Horanyi, a professor of physics and a research associate at LASP, was the principal investigator on the Student Dust Counter. And like all his peers, has had his hand in many other projects there as well.
A 63yearold who has been at LASP since 1992, Horanyi values the dynamics of discovery that build on the “uninhibited” spirit of inquiry students bring to the laboratory’s culture.
“Most of the time you would say, ‘That is really silly,’ but sometimes you say, ‘Ouch, I didn’t think about that,’ ” Horanyi said. “Those are very precious. Those are very interesting moments in our discussions.”