Second interview with Arthur Code (June 23, 2006): Tapes 3-6

Art Code (#776) Transcript RL: This is tape number four, side one, of the ongoing interview of the emeritus professor of astronomy, Art Code, June 23, 2006. Tape four, side one. AC: You were asking if the administration had encouraged hiring new staff, and said they'd provide the money for it. My approach had always been to go to the dean and say, "Here's a great opportunity." And in any cases I said that. But in the case of hiring somebody new, "Here's a great opportunity. This person is really terrific. Are we going to have them? And here's where we can get some money to pay for them the first year. And next year, so and so is going on leave." I always presented options. I didn't ask them for money. I 00:01:00 tried to tell them how they could do it without seriously hurting their budget. And so I never had any, any resistance during, I was the chairman of the department for twelve years. And during that twelve years, I never had any declines or any difficulty. We, once we got into the space program, which I'll describe in more detail shortly, just the overhead on our grants was larger than the department budget. So it was in the 00:02:00 university's interest to keep the Astronomy Department going. Because it was a source of income. Now let's talk about the space program project and some details on that. We came up with, after two years, came up with a reasonable design based on help from others on campus as well as within the department. One of the things that early on we had considered was using wood as a construction material. Wood has a lot of satisfactory characteristics. The electrical conductivity is very low. Its magnetic 00:03:00 properties are low. Thermal conductivity is low. It's stronger for the given weight. It's stronger than steel or other metals that you might use. RL: Wood is stronger than steel? AC: Mm hmm. And it's not, vibration is damped out, the velocity of sound is low, the attenuation of sound in wood is high. The main thing wrong with wood is that it is not isotropic or uniform. It has grain. But we had an 00:04:00 organization here at the University of Wisconsin, the Forest Products Lab, who knew all about the properties of wood and processed it. You bake it to get all the moisture out. And then you fill all of the grain with epoxy. And you can control different parameters if you wish. If you wish some particular electrical conductivity or thermal conductivity. You can put that into the epoxy, or you can sandwich aluminum foil between wood and various ways you can process it to make the wood what you want. And it's under these circumstances that it is now grainless, is uniform in any direction, or isotropic and is stronger than metal. So we had several meetings with the forest people, at the Forest Products Lab. And they were very interested. But other events, which 00:05:00 I'll get to, changed the time schedule in which the designs and studies would have to be completed for using wood in the structure. And Forest Products Lab just didn't think they could make that time schedule. We did use one simple application of wood in a couple of our rocket experiments, as did Vern Suomi in his first meteorological satellite. And that was, at that time we were using photomultiplier tubes. And we inserted the photomultiplier tubes into a cavity that we put in balsa wood. And this then protected the glass envelope of the photomultiplier from vibration 00:06:00 and from, well, you could drop it and it wouldn't break. So a protection for photomultipliers, balsa wood. And Vern Suomi thought that was a great idea that we were using. He used it in his early satellites. So some of the wood we got up there. [laughter] But that, that never evolved into anything more than that. When we went to the first meeting at the new organization, NASA, they said, "We have a better idea. We know that all, any astronomical measurements require (pointing?), power, communication. And so we're proposing to make a standardized platform that any instruments could use. And we're proposing what we call the orbiting astronomical observatory series. And it will be able to accommodate a thousand, or a few thousand 00:07:00 pound load, provide a kilowatt or more of power, and communication, necessary communication and storage. So this was a far cry from the hundred-pound satellite we were talking about. RL: Indeed. AC: And all we had to do was provide the instrument. Everything else would be provided by this standard platform. So that changed the project considerably. We didn't have to think about how solar cells worked and what kind of materials you should have on the outside of a satellite and many other details. We then 00:08:00 got a grant to pursue just the photometer inside. These were large, large grants. We set up the Space Astronomy, we had already set up the Space Astronomy Laboratory and used facilities here at Sterling Hall. And Sterling Hall is another story that I haven't told you about, that we could just take a diversion right now and say something about it. The Washburn Observatory had fairly crowded quarters. You couldn't grow any larger than a couple of faculty members and a couple of graduate students would fit in that building at the time. So plans to house us in a wing that they put on old Sterling 00:09:00 Hall had evolved during the time that I was at Cal Tech. So when I got back, there was already engineering work on a new, a new structure, a new wing of Sterling Hall. It was to be funded in part by the army, the Army Math Center to be located in it, and by WARF. And so another thing we were involved in at the beginning was participating in a building, building committee to decide what we wanted here. And we were just going to have one floor, the sixth floor, and some telescopes on the roof. And except for the main floor, which was the Army Math Center, the rest would be physics. Oh, and the computer center was directly above the Math Center. Computer Center was on the third floor because later on it had an IBM 3600 in Room 3600. At any rate-- RL: How convenient. AC: So we moved to the new wing of Sterling Hall and it was there that we had the machine shop and other facilities that we used to test the ideas for our 00:10:00 100-pound satellite. But to expand beyond that, we first rented a part of one of the houses, old houses, on Johnson Street, where chemistry is located now. RL: Oh. AC: And some other department used some of the rooms in this house, too. So that was the first Space Astronomy Laboratory, part of a house on Johnson Street, while we looked around for better rental facilities. We did find a better facility, and it was on Park Street. It was the (Kesenek?) Restaurant Supply, and they had left there, it was that building. It was right next to auto, Schmidt's Auto Salvage. And Schmidt's still exists, I believe, on Park Street. In fact, when we finally left there, they took over the 00:11:00 building, the Space Astronomy Lab building. Well this building on Park Street was a building. And then in the rear of it was an extension that was a large Quonset hut structure. We initially shared some of the space with meteorology. W moved into 35 North Park is the address. Meteorology mainly used the space to store things. So mainly they used the Quonset hut in the back. Perhaps interesting thing about the stuff they were 00:12:00 storing, they were storing IBM punch cards. If you took all the punch cards that were stored there and put them in this room, it would completely fill the room right up to the ceiling. RL: Amazing. AC: And a lot of weight. [laughs] Probably you could put all the data onto a couple of flash memories today. But the idea was, these were records of temperature and pressure as a function of altitude at various sites all over the world. And the idea at that time was to be able to make forecasts using the analog day. You found some day in the history of all this data that's the same as today. And so 00:13:00 tomorrow's weather is going to be the same as it was twenty-three years ago, and everything is the same. That really doesn't work very well, because things are not the same. Where it used to be green grass, it's now concrete. So that there isn't such a thing as an analog day. But at any rate, that was one of the ideas. We had a machine shop located at Park Street. Essentially a laboratory where we could work with things in a vacuum. Because if you're doing something in space, in general you manufacture it in a 1G environment. And usually at normal pressure and temperatures. After you finish it, you put it in a rocket or some vehicle where it gets shaken up a bit and accelerations of 10Gs or so. And now it's in orbit and the, 0Gs, 00:14:00 temperature, depending on whether you're on the sunny side or the dark side, it's going to be 100 degrees or 100 degrees below zero, depending upon just what the surfaces are like. Oh, at any rate, you now expect the instrument to work. And nobody knew, it hadn't been done before, and nobody knew just how you do this, so everything was a learning experience for the engineers that had to do it, and for the astronomers that had to decide how the instruments should be made. We had to learn about this. And it was a very, very ambitious program that NASA started no with this standard platform, the OAO, starting with no knowledge of how to make things work in space. But, 00:15:00 and it's a step that might not be possible to take today with all the safeguards set up in the bureaucracy, and the forms, and the quality assurance people would have to watch every step of what you do, and so on. So-- RL: And the time period for this is you're in the mid 1960s. Or earlier? AC: It's, let me see if I, NASA was formed in October of 1958, right? RL: Mm hmm. AC: And we're talking about early '60. Well, it was, by 1960, the decision, the OAO [Orbiting Astronomical 00:16:00 Observatory] decision had been made by NASA. So at any rate, we were funded to work on the instrumentation for a much bigger photometer. And the next thing we went to, or told, the, well, because it was, could accommodate a thousand pounds, the OAO would accommodate a telescope one meter in diameter, it was, the length was a little over three meters, or ten feet, and in order to accommodate that, what we did is essentially duplicate our hundred-pound photometer a few times. We had four separate eight-inch telescopes with, we were working a little different part of the ultraviolet spectrum, had little different filter sets. And a sixteen-inch telescope set in the center, so these four surrounded this sixteen-inch telescope, which would be more sensitive to 00:17:00 looking at clouds of gas and galaxies, surface brightness objects. And then we had two scanning spectrometers. So we clustered these instruments. And that could fill up the one-meter aperture. But still, it was still kind of short. Only about half, only occupied about half the length. Now another proposer in the early days was Smithsonian, Harvard Smithsonian project. And they had proposed taking images in the ultraviolet and had small telescope as a camera. And what they did is duplicate it, have four of them, 00:18:00 instead of just one. So they took the same approach to accommodating this bigger volume. Well it was suggested by NASA at this second meeting attended, that Smithsonian and Wisconsin should go together and work out how you're going to distribute your small instruments. At the time, I suggested that well, maybe we could look out in one direction and they could look out in the other direction, and then we don't have difficult problems of interfacing and agreeing on how to operate and so on. We just sometimes, it would be pointed so the instruments looking at one direction would be 00:19:00 pointing at their objects. If there were objects in the opposite direction that could work out, that's all right. And we said no, that's impossible. We can't do that. Putting holes in both ends. So when the next meeting occurred, we were told that they had a great idea, that the Smithsonian could look out in one direction, and we could look out in the other direction. And that was the way that the, in the early days, NASA operated. That is, when they thought about it, it was a reasonable idea, and that's what they agreed to. And if you presented reasonable ideas to people at 00:20:00 NASA, if it really was reasonable, it came about. That's not the way things happen today. A reasonable idea may not be politically correct. It may not be consistent with what somebody else who's in charge has decided, and so on. And if so, if it represents a change, and changes are not done casually. Changes are done by first writing out a change order. And then the change order goes to a panel which reviews all change orders. And it may or may not happen. At any rate, things were-- RL: So in the early days-- AC: In the early days, things were much more relaxed because nobody ever 00:21:00 done this before. RL: But not only relaxed, my sense is that there was more respect for general intellectual inquiry. AC: Uh, everybody that was in the business, whether it was NASA or outside people, were in the business to do space research. The people we dealt with primarily came from the Naval Research Lab. That was the way that NASA was able to have an instant astronomy program was to offer jobs to, and NRL people. So they were all just like us. So it was a different atmosphere than there is today, where there are people who are most interested in management, or most interested in their career, or whatever. So this is the project we worked on for a number of years. Most of the time was spent at, working on it, at 35 North Park Street. And it wasn't until later on 00:22:00 that we, that the Space Astronomy Lab moved on to campus. That comes after the Sterling Hall bombing. One of the things I have to tell you about, wherever the Space Astronomy Lab is located, what was its relation to the Astronomy Department. That's an issue at the present time. But the thinking, my thinking was at the time that we got into this program that, as I mentioned earlier, just the overhead on our grants was larger than 00:23:00 the department budget. This was a big thing in terms of at the height, the number of people required to work on this. And, uh--[pause] RL: This is side two of tape four, Art Code. AC: I thought at the time that the OAO project, Orbiting Astronomical Observatory project, was a big deal. And yet the most important element was, we're in the business of astronomy, and the Astronomy Department is the real entity. But if we included the space astronomy activity just within the department, it would be the tail wagging the dog. And that would also perhaps cause some division among those people who 00:24:00 are not involved in the space program. And all this office space is being taken up by the space lab people, and they get all these nice machines, and we don't have them for the department. And I thought it was important to keep them separate. Because Pine Bluff Observatory, if the telescope isn't working, something breaks down, then has highest priority, you get out there and you fix it so that by nighttime you'll be able to observe again. If a projector in a classroom stops working, it's got to be replaced or fixed right away. You've got to take care of all the courses, and so 00:25:00 on. Whereas if you're working on an instrument for space, you have a time you have to deliver the equipment on such and such a date. Launches have a particular time schedule. So while these things have the highest priority, you've got to have two separate shops. You can't have one, because you'd have no way of resolving the conflict and high priority. So for these reasons, I thought it would be better to create Space Astronomy Laboratory and have it part of the Astronomy Department, and beholden to the Astronomy Department, and involve faculty members and students. But be a separate entity, so you wouldn't have conflicts. RL: Do you still think that was a good 00:26:00 decision? AC: Oh, yes. It's not necessary today, because there aren't big projects like that being worked on. Even, even though right now Ed Churchill is involved in a major project. The instruments are made under contract to NASA by companies and not in any shop here on campus. Things are done differently. So what you're doing is doing research, not fabricating instruments that are done on the basis of a very strict time schedule. So you don't have to have the separation. At any rate, we were, as I say, we carried out this activity, Space Lab, at 35 North Park Street. The bombing of 00:27:00 Sterling Hall resulted in, well, first of all, damage to this building. Half of the Sterling Hall wing was, had to be reconstructed. And so we lived with plywood running down the hall to separate the two sides of the building. And we lived in just the north side of the building for a while without any heating or air condition. So we had fans and electric heaters in the offices for about a year here. The, what was it that I was going to add. Well, at any rate, the old chemistry building was badly damaged. But there 00:28:00 had already been plans afoot for a new chemistry building that we put up on Johnson Street. So this, then, involved the construction of Chamberlain Hall. And when Chamberlain Hall was finished, then the Space Astronomy moved from 35 North Park Street to the top floor of new Chamberlain Hall structure. It could have moved to another place, and slightly sooner, and that was Space Science and Engineering. There were two people on campus who were the major recipients of NASA support and for NASA programs. And that was Vern Suomi in meteorology, and myself. We put in a proposal at a time when NASA was funding construction of buildings. We put in a proposal for a, what ultimately became the Space Science and Engineering Center. Using our past accomplishments and so on as an inducement for NASA to do this. And the university got the Space Science and Engineering Center. And when we were constructing the proposal, was included space for both meteorology and astronomy. But when the possibility of Chamberlain Hall came about, we said that we weren't going to occupy our space in the Space Science and Engineering Center, we wanted to be closer to the Astronomy Department. So we 00:29:00 didn't move in there. Slightly later, we were able to move into Chamberlain Hall. Yeah. Okay. And during all this time, the number of graduate students and the faculty increased. And the reputation of the department, the stature increased. And in particular, of course, was for one of two universities for many years who were involved in space programs and in actually fabricating stuff on our own, and the other one is Princeton. RL: Art, let me ask you, isn't it a fact, actually, that it was your work, your leadership with the OAO program that was absolutely essential to the building of the reputation of the department here at UW? AC: I don't think that's necessarily so. Well, if I weren't doing space astronomy, I'd be doing 00:30:00 something else, and there were other important things going on here. So we know it was an important element, yes. [laughter] RL: That's probably the best I'll get from you. But that's certainly what I hear and read. AC: Over, over the years, we thought that it was very important for any astronomy department who claimed to be a first class institution to have a large telescope of their own. And over the years when 00:31:00 I was chairman of the department, we made several attempts to get a large telescope. We got a commitment of a certain amount of money from WARF. We applied to NSF twice with two different programs. First there was the Wisconsin/University of Washington proposal for a four-meter class telescope. That was called the Wishwash. [laughter] And then the same proposal with the University of California. They had an ideal site in California. And this was Santa Cruz, where the astronomers who came from Mount Hamilton Observatory Dome. And that proposal was apparently judged by peer review and such as excellent.It ranked number one with no funding. [laughter] So those attempts were not successful. Later on, we got involved in two programs who had two large telescopes. But earlier than 00:32:00 that, that started while Whitford was still here. There was an effort, a proposal for a national observatory in which all anybody had the opportunity to use the facilities. Present a program, and it was peer reviewed. And that was the basis for getting time on the telescope. But it evolved from an astronomer at Indiana University, John Irwin was his name, who worked primarily in photoelectric astronomy. There you need clear weather. That was for--and he determined that the sunniest spot in the United States was Yuma, Arizona. And he proposed that people get together and talk about it, and a conference 00:33:00 was arranged. These were in the early days of National Science Foundation, National Science Foundation had probably been in existence about two years. And there was this National Science Foundation conference held in Flagstaff, Arizona, on photoelectric photometry, essentially. I attended that conference. I gave a paper there. And there was a second half of the conference after the scientific discussion was discussion about a small photometric telescope in Yuma, Arizona, was the start of this. And the wheelers and dealers of that time included Albert Whitford and Leo Goldberg at Michigan. Shane from University of California. And Goldberg said, "We should be thinking big. Big telescope and a national observatory, and not just a national photometric telescope in 00:34:00 Yuma." And University of Michigan presented a proposal to NSF for a site survey for a national observatory. The first director of NSF was still the director of NSF at this time. I'll think of his name shortly. At any rate, this evolved into a consortium of universities called AURA, Association for Universities for Research in Astronomy. At that time, it consisted of, on the East Coast, Harvard. On the West Coast, University of California, Berkeley. The University of California. RL: [laughs] Yeah. AC: And then, so that's two of them. Ohio State. RL: Oh! AC: Michigan, Indiana, Chicago, and Wisconsin. Yeah, seven. So that, those are the founding members of AURA, which now consists of perhaps twenty-five universities. RL: What was the year on this? 00:35:00 Approximately? AC: All of these things happened just about the same time. This would have been, let's say, about 1955, 1954. RL: Okay. AC: It was when I was an instructor here. When was that? RL: That was '50- AC: '50 to '52. RL: '50 to '52, yes. Or '52 to '56, you were assistant professor. AC: Okay. So it might have been '55 or '54. Any rate, it culminated in the 00:36:00 incorporation of AURA in 1957. RL: I see. AC: So, '55, probably, '54, that's probably right for this meeting and the beginning of these activities, that resulted in first of site survey and they looked primarily in Arizona and Nevada. The reason being that the weather cycle is different on the east side of the mountains and the west side of the mountains. The weather cycle in Arizona is different than that in California. California, you get a lot of cloudy weather and storms and such in the winter. And spring, in particular, is bad. In Arizona, it's the summer that, 00:37:00 starting about the Fourth of July, the monsoons come and it gets cloudy and rainy and such. And in fact, telescopes nowadays, the Arizona telescopes, for the most part, close down during July and August for all the maintenance activities, and anything that has to be done, because that's cloudy time. So they don't schedule the telescope 00:38:00 during August. So that was the rationale for finding the winter and springtime, or the time to look at galaxies. That part of the sky is up. So if you have put telescopes up in the desert, in Nevada or Arizona, you'll have clearer weather at the time, you can observe galaxies. And it will be filling in the time that you can't observe from California. Weather cycles, you know, change. And things become different. Usually 00:39:00 site surveys are made at a time when there's a drought. So everything looks great. It's clear all the time. Never rains. And by the time you get around to building the observatory, the drought's over, and the conditions are different.But there was a sound rationale for putting up a major observatory in the Southwest, rather than California. In, ultimately, a peak was settled on near Tucson in the Indian reservation that, they now call themselves the Tohono O'odham. But they were, at that time, it was the Papago Indian Reservation, and the tribe's name was Papago. 00:40:00 "Papago" means potato pickers. And they didn't think that was dignified for them. So when they got into running casinos, they changed their name. [laughter] At any rate, this was one of their sacred mountains, although it was not the most sacred. And the Bureau of Indian Affairs was involved, and a treaty was actually constructed and signed and a 99-year lease for the top of the mountain. Not the whole mountain, just it started at a certain elevation, for these people with the long eyes, to set up and look at the stars. Wisconsin has always been a player in AURA. A number of telescopes were 00:41:00 built, the largest constructed there is the four-meter telescope. A similar observatory was set up in the Southern hemisphere under the auspices of AURA. And that's called the Cerra Tololo Observatory, Tololo being-- RL: Where is that? AC: It's east, in the foothills of the Andes, east of Santiago. No, no, east of La Serena. And La Serena is 150, 190 miles north of Santiago. There are now three observatories, three mountains. One of them was set up about the same time as AURA started, the Cerra Tololo Observatory. La Silla, which is the saddle or chair. And that's European Space, European Southern Observatory. And it's a consortium of European nations. Their 00:42:00 headquarters are in Garching, north of Munich. And there is an observatory that was Carnegie Institution of Cal Tech, or Carso. And now finally the Europeans have another site in which they have four eight-meter telescopes. Add them all together, the biggest collecting area in the Southern hemisphere. And I guess the biggest in the world. So the Southern sky, Southern hemisphere is very important in astronomy. Well, I said Wisconsin played a role in these, first of all, being a part of AURA, and Cerra Tololo, the Southern hemisphere branch of that activity. But then the headquarters for AURA, it's called NOAO, National Optical Astronomical Observatories, which runs CTIO and Kitt Peak. Kitt Peak was this sacred mountain that they have a treaty for 99 years. And they were carrying out experiments for a larger telescope. Different ways of fabricating 00:43:00 telescope mirrors and controlling the shape and the temperature of the mirrors in this program. They were getting a mirror from the University of Arizona, which the University of Arizona Mirror Lab has, makes large mirrors using one of the three techniques that exists today for large mirrors. For some thirty years, the largest telescope in the world had been the Hale Telescope, Mount Palomar. The 200-inch, or five-meter telescope. 00:44:00 There was a larger one. There was a larger one made by the Soviets, but it never worked