NASA Science Mission Directorate
Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Reta F. Beebe
Interviewed by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
Las Cruces, New Mexico – 25 April 2017
Ross-Nazzal:
Today is April 25, 2017. This interview with Dr. Reta Beebe is being
conducted at New Mexico State University for the Science Mission Directorate
Oral History Project. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted
by Sandra Johnson. Thanks again for sharing some time with us today.
We certainly appreciate it and know you’re busy working on many
other projects. I wanted to start by asking you about your interest
in astronomy as a child.
Beebe:
My background is strange in that I was a country girl, I lived out
in the country. I went to a small school, actually a three-room school,
for most of the time. My parents were displaced by the Dust Bowl problems,
so my father worked mainly in construction and repair of farm buildings.
He was a private contractor. My father was 54 when I was born, and
in his younger days he had been a genuine cowboy who ranged the West.
In those days, there were remittance men who were very well-educated
misfit Easterners. Their family paid them to stay out West; that was
why they were called remittance men. In the wintertime, because my
father didn’t have a home to go home to, he frequently worked
in what was called a line shack. Your major job was to keep track
of the water, especially for the cattle. Frequently, his companion
in one of these line shacks would be one of these well-educated people.
My father was what you would classify as a naturalist. He had a sixth
grade education, but he had an amazing amount of information he had
collected himself on anatomy and biology. So I grew up in a well-informed
environment that was not identified at all as “science.”
Of course, having lived out like that, he knew all the constellations
and knew which planet was which, but I didn’t know that was
science when I was growing up.
The other side of my childhood was that we were not affluent. I was
not a desirable companion for other people my age, especially as the
mothers looked at it. So I didn’t get caught, in the period
that I grew up, where the major ambition of a female was she was supposed
to go to college, find an engineer, and have two and a half children.
I was left alone to do my own thing.
I started out in high school with a real interest in art, but I wasn’t
arty so I had trouble fitting in. My second year of college I switched
over to chemistry. I was going to teach school and paint on the isle
of Mykonos [Greece] in the summer. I taught school for three years,
but I never got to Mykonos, because I got involved in curriculum development.
I actually had moved into teaching Earth science instead of chemistry.
I was developing curriculum for eighth grade Earth science and decided
I didn’t know enough so I went back to graduate school.
Even though I was on leave from my junior high, I decided to stay
put and continue working on a Ph.D. in astrophysics. It was the Earth
science study that drew me in. I had married my senior year of college.
My husband was a chemical engineer who had returned to become a teacher,
and we both went back to graduate school together. We went through
graduate school together, and we still haven’t divorced.
Ross-Nazzal:
That seemed rather unusual to me, to see that the two of you were
going to graduate school together. You were a female in an environment
that probably didn’t have many other women.
Beebe:
At the University of Indiana [Indiana University, Bloomington] there
was a professor named Marshal [H.] Wrubel who had a lot of forward
insight. One of his major interests was the application of computers
into simulation and modeling in astronomy. He was really quite open-minded.
The year that I went into graduate school there, they had installed
a program of introductory astronomy that was actually being televised
outward. The department had gotten several new assistantships. The
faculty decided that they would grant some of these assistantships
to essentially weirdos—looking for some originality—figuring
if these people dropped out, then the following year they could refill
these positions with some[one] that was more traditional. The one
that my husband and I entered—both funded, which was really
surprising—was this class where they were looking for something
other than the standard. Quite a few of us survived.
Ross-Nazzal:
Were you the only woman that was selected as a TA [teaching assistant]?
Beebe:
No, no. At that point in time they already had two females in [the
department]. There was an attitude in that department of diversity
you might say. That department also had Benjamin Franklin Peery, who
at that time was the only black professional astronomer in the world,
I think. Certainly in the U.S. I was lucky to get into Indiana University
at that time.
Ross-Nazzal:
What was the state of affairs in astrophysics at that time? What was
the field like?
Beebe:
We were pretty limited by computing. What was really interesting,
though, was that the astronomy and physics students were already ahead
of almost every other group of students on campus. There was a central
computer which had quite a bit of capability. The astronomy and physics
students were allowed to use it from midnight to 7:00 every night,
so we essentially lived in the computer center and did quite a bit
of modeling.
Ross-Nazzal:
So you had quite a bit of experience before you started working with
modeling for NASA.
Beebe:
Actually, as an undergraduate—I had a very fractured undergraduate.
I went to Washburn University [Topeka, Kansas] my freshman year. Then
I went to the Kansas City Art Institute [Missouri], and I thought
maybe because I wasn’t really deeply into art that I was a misfit.
Then I decided no, I’m a misfit. So I went to Kansas City University
[Kansas] and started taking math and science. Then I came home to
Colorado, to the University of Colorado [Boulder], and finished the
degree in chemistry with education credits to teach.
When [my husband] Herb [Herbert A. Beebe] and I decided we wanted
to really go to graduate school, we needed to do some makeup [classes].
As a chemical engineer and a chemistry major, we didn’t have
enough math and physics. So we went to the University of Idaho [Moscow]
for two years, and that was great.
Our selection of the University of Idaho was based on three things.
One, tuition was cheap. Two, they had really an excellent reputation
of their undergraduate students going on to outstanding universities.
And three, it wasn’t close to either one of our families so
we wouldn’t be disrupted. We knew we were headed for a cram
course if this was going to work. It was a great place to be for that.
So we finished that and then went to graduate school.
When I was at Idaho University, I actually took a class in computer
science and then got a job working in the computer center there. By
the time I started graduate school, my computer skills were considerably
better than the other students. I actually worked programming for
two of the different faculty members, because at that point in time
the faculty members really weren’t that outstanding in computing—except
for Marshal Wrubel.
Ross-Nazzal:
What was your dissertation on?
Beebe:
A red giant, a star that has evolved to the point that the atmosphere
has extended greatly. Most of my work had to do with identification
of molecules in the atmosphere. These stars have gone through a process
where they’ve generated heavy metals internally and then transported
them to the atmosphere. Looking for wonderful things like zirconium
and trying to figure out how to build an atmosphere that would predict
the spectra that we were getting from Palomar [Observatory, California
Institute of Technology, San Diego].
Ross-Nazzal:
Sounds like an awful lot of work.
Beebe:
No, it was fun.
Ross-Nazzal:
Your husband came down here, as I understand it, and became a faculty
member here, but there wasn’t enough space for both of you.
You ended up working for Los Alamos [National Laboratory] for some
time?
Beebe:
As a graduate student I worked at Los Alamos.
Ross-Nazzal:
Oh, you did?
Beebe:
Yes, summers. Because of the work that I was doing, I had experience
in coding molecular formation and dissociation. So I was useful at
Los Alamos in terms of interpreting atmospheric phenomena. After Herb
came down here, I continued to work there. Then I started essentially
consulting, because the computer I was working there was the same
one we had here, so I could simply transfer my codes here.
The university actually gave me office space and computer time to
be able to continue my work down here. I had been here a fairly short
time when Bradford [Bradford A.] Smith decided he needed—I think
NASA told him that he needed more modeling and interpretation among
his team. He had essentially taken over from Clyde [W. Tombaugh].
Clyde was still the figurehead for the group, but Brad Smith was running
it. So he hired me to start to work on the modeling and the interpretations.
In 1973, I was working full-time for him. Then he left and went to
the University of Arizona [Tucson]. They did a faculty search, and
at the end of the faculty search they decided that they didn’t
really want to hire any of those people, so I was hired. By then Herb
was department head, so you’ve got nepotism problems. But Vice
President [Donald C.] Roush was a pretty smart character. The way
he solved that problem was that basically I had a letter that said
that Herb was not my boss. Any decision that was made in terms of
my promotion or anything would be made by the dean of [the College
of] Arts and Sciences. So that solved that problem.
I took over the group that was working on planetary science here,
but that was the point in time where the group needed to transition
between an aging staff and encompassing graduate students.
Ross-Nazzal:
So before you came on board there were no graduate students that anyone
was advising?
Beebe:
There were graduate students in the department, but the planetary
group had been working under Clyde Tombaugh for quite a few years.
They were just staff-oriented. They used undergraduate students to
do real peon labor, but they hadn’t encompassed graduate students
into the program yet.
Ross-Nazzal:
What did you start working on? Did you continue the type of work that
you were doing for Los Alamos?
Beebe:
No.
Ross-Nazzal:
You started working on atmosphere for Jupiter?
Beebe:
Yes, I was trying to do analysis. The first project I worked on was
the clouds of Venus, and looking for periodic returns of cloud patterns.
That was a challenging project because we observed Venus in the daytime
at the observatory in the bluest light we could reach.
You see these cartoons of the telescope sticking out of the slit.
When we observed Venus, our telescope stuck out of the slit. We actually
had another attachment that we put on the top of the telescope to
keep the Sun from shining down onto the mirror. By the time that we
got that on, it was literally outside of the slit, so somebody stood
up in the slit and watched the shadow of the Sun to make certain it
didn’t hit the mirror. If it hit the mirror and had come back
on the secondary [mirror], it would have probably shattered the secondary.
So you had two people observing at all times.
We also had a lid that we would put down on this attachment, which
had a bean shape in it. If we needed to get really close to the Sun,
we could make certain that this side over here [demonstrates] was
where the Sun was coming in. It was lots of fun to do that kind of
thing.
Then you actually studied the images, mapped the structures you could
see in UV [ultraviolet light], and attempted to look for recurrences.
It was a four-day period that came out of it. The conclusion was that
that four-day period was not being generated at some longitude on
the planet, that it was randomly generated. That was just the rate
at which it moved. You weren’t looking for some high mountain
ridge that was creating a pattern, it was just a global phenomenon
that recurred.
Ross-Nazzal:
How did you get involved in working on the [NASA] Voyager project?
I know that Bradford Smith was the PI [principal investigator] for
imaging science.
Beebe:
Yes. We were observing Jupiter, and we were funded by NASA to try
to understand the conditions in the atmosphere of Jupiter as those
guys got ready to run their mission. Elmer [J.] Reese was the person
who was doing a lot of the analysis when I arrived. Elmer Reese was
a [great] teacher and a wonderful guy. He was one of the last astronomers
who did their own reading. He was an unschooled amateur who grew into
being a real professional. He died only a few years ago [2010] in
Houston. He had retired and gone there with family.
He was just tremendous. I worked with him implementing quick looks,
then using the measurements that he was doing to get wind speeds,
and then do predicts. Basically, our job for Voyager was to do the
predicts of when the long-lived features would be visible on the planet
so that they could do the long-term planning and scheduling.
We did Voyager 1, and then we had enough time to do Voyager 2. We
did Voyager 2 with the understanding that we would redo it as we got
closer. But we didn’t redo it because our predicts were good
enough, and the cloud system is consistent enough, that we could use
all that we had done before. It saved a lot of time. We were really
deeply involved in the scheduling of what would happen.
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s fascinating. You knew enough about the planet to have
an idea of what would be coming, what to photograph.
Beebe:
The atmosphere is deep enough that once [a large] cloud structure
forms, it takes a long time for it to dissipate. So once you’ve
characterized it pretty well—there are events that speed them
up, so you may have to correct it later, but we would have known how
it speeded up. On Jupiter, the way it speeds up—it’s like
somebody kicks it quickly and then drags it down slowly. We could
do pretty good predictions. Even if one of our features had sped up,
we could do a prediction of how its rate would decay and be able to
predict when it would show up again.
Ross-Nazzal:
How knowledgeable were you about the imaging system itself before
Voyager went out?
Beebe:
Voyager spacecraft is an interesting spacecraft. The cameras were
very, very well-defined, very well-calibrated. They were electrostatically
focused. They weren’t CCD [charged-couple device] cameras like
we have now. They burned little dots in the face, so that every image
that we had had these little dots. When you calibrate the Voyager
data, you have to geometrically stretch it to bring it back to where
the dots should be instead of where they appear.
It was all very well-controlled. Compared to the CCD cameras, the
major thing that I see that’s different is that there was a
tendency for the radiation that had fallen on a single point on the
detector to spread a little bit. So we didn’t get as sharp a
spatial resolution as you can get with the CCD cameras. The CCD cameras
that the amateurs are using now are just wonderful. They’ve
got them linked into their laptops, and they’re doing really
great image reconstruction.
Ross-Nazzal:
I imagine technology has changed. When you were working on Voyager,
were you out there for the entire time—there was the Jupiter
encounter, Saturn encounter?
Beebe:
No, I was teaching as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
I was curious about that, how you juggled the two.
Beebe:
I split my time between the two. Half of the time I think I was a
walking zombie. I could leave here and go to El Paso [Texas], get
the first flight out to LAX [Los Angeles airport, California], get
a rental car, go to [NASA] JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
California] for a meeting, and when it was over I could get back home
again. If it was something critical I could do that.
Otherwise, I tried to have my classes either Tuesdays and Thursdays
or Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so that I could find a time when
I had a little more than 24 hours to do it. In the summertime, I spent
time out there working on it. A lot of the early targeting we did
was done in the summer, but when the thing was under way then I would
just simply take a break for a real encounter and be out there.
Ross-Nazzal:
What are your memories of Voyager 1 when all of that data started
coming in? Were you out there or were you back here in Las Cruces?
Beebe:
I was out there, yes.
Ross-Nazzal:
What are your memories? And what are your memories of other people’s
reactions?
Beebe:
Some of my earliest memories were that we weren’t that great
at pointing. One of our jobs was to watch the data coming in. It would
come in on a TV screen in a very fixed format. You had this format,
but the image itself would wander around because our pointing was
not as stable as it should have been.
So the result was that we would watch, and if it started to drift
off you would open a line which took you to the [NASA] Deep Space
Net [Network] that was receiving the data. What you wanted to find
out was whether those engineers knew whether it was offline or not.
So you would open the line and you would hear the commands going around
that, “We’ve got it.” You would know they were bringing
it back in, so you didn’t have to say anything. If you opened
the line and there was nothing going on, then you would have to wake
them up to the fact that it was drifting off. That was one of the
things I remember doing.
I was sitting there watching these images come in. Of course we were
looking at Jupiter first, because it was biggest and the features
on it are big so we could see things on it. You would see the [Great]
Red Spot in five different color filters. When you’re looking
at it in ultraviolet or blue, it looks almost black. By the time you
get as far out as we could see in the red with the Voyager camera,
it would just be blending into the background.
The Red Spot—unblue is a better way to describe it. Little kids
love that idea, that it’s unblue. Whatever the contaminant in
there that makes it look red, it’s because it absorbs the blue
and part of the green light, so that what you see coming back is selected
light. It was neat to watch the resolution grow, because it got beyond
anything I had seen on Earth. I had been seeing these features on
Earth, but now I could see details inside of them. I could see more
of it. That was very interesting.
Then, when we got to the point that we were near the encounters, that
was strange.
Ross-Nazzal:
Why was it strange?
Beebe:
The Voyager mission was so popular that the press just descended on
us as herds. Foreign press—you had Iraq and Iran there, you
had Northern Ireland and southern Ireland there. PR [public relations]
people were making certain they had them all seated properly so that
things didn’t happen. The place was totally jammed with these
big trucks with their transmission antennas.
In those days, a lot of the PR was done in hard copy. We had this
procedure where the day before the press conference you would decide
which images you were going to release. Then you had to process the
images and clean them up. You took that product on a tape under your
arm, and you trotted over to the photo lab [laboratory] where they
had a device that converted it to a negative. They ran off the negatives,
and then one of us trotted over to the photo lab to get the negatives
to take them to the press conference. They were passed out as hard
copy, and then they were scanned and sent. You had all of that process
going on, so you were working day and night.
Ross-Nazzal:
How did you come up with the process of deciding what were the best
images, and the captions and writing those press releases? How did
you make those decisions?
Beebe:
You knew what you had planned for the day, to start with. You knew
what you thought the highlights would be, so you would start with
those and get your first rough cut by seeing what had come down. Then
you would look at what had come down and you would decide which ones
were ready for release. There were PR people that worked with us to
get the captions. We would write a caption, and they would edit it
into real English. A couple of them were really very good.
Ross-Nazzal:
I imagine that was difficult cutting those down.
Beebe:
I didn’t have that much trouble, because I was teaching at the
same time. You had to really make certain that you defined everything.
Ross-Nazzal:
I’ve seen some interesting photos where it looked like the press
were just surrounding desks and looking for that lead story.
Beebe:
That’s right. During that period of time—I’ve forgotten
which encounter it was, but it was fairly early in the mission. I
think it was Andy [Andrew P.] Ingersoll [who] decided that the press
needed to be educated. At about 2:00 on the previous afternoon, they
would open the von Karman Auditorium [at JPL] to the press. Members
of the team would go down and sit on the edge of the stage and have
what was called a bull pen.
There would be a bit of a briefing on what was happening for the next
day and then answer a lot of questions. There were science reporters
in the crowd who reported for things like Sky & Telescope that
were really good. [J.] Kelly Beatty was one of those. The tutorial
actually came from Kelly asking the question and then hearing the
teams respond. That filled in these people that were looking for their
story. It had been translated and they knew what was coming, so then
in the press conference these other press people could ask intelligent
questions and get their bonus points with their bosses.
That process worked very well. We carried it through that whole mission.
It’s still done to some extent for various missions. We used
it very heavily during the period of time when the [Shoemaker-Levy
9] comet hit Jupiter [in July 1994] and we were using the [Hubble]
Space Telescope. We very quickly put the bull pen back in for that
because the press really needed to be educated to do what they could
do best.
[When the Voyager images] started to come down [and] you could really
see the highest resolution, especially when we first started to get
Io [the moon of Jupiter, there was a delay in response]. Although
Stan [Stanton J.] Peale at University [of California] at Santa Barbara
had written an article about the fact that the tidal interaction of
the various bodies around Jupiter should generate quite a bit of heating,
the geologists that were on the team really hadn’t swallowed
that completely. So when we started to see these really strange features,
they didn’t immediately land on volcanism. It just didn’t
fit the way they were thinking at the time.
It wasn’t until after the mission was really over and looking
back—Linda [A.] Morabito saw the big plume. Then all of a sudden
it was, “Oh, yeah! Oh ho ho, well I wonder what the lava is?
It’s got to be some really low temperature lava or wouldn’t
be working.” Well, sulfur. The atoms are heavy enough you wouldn’t
lose them. As you processed, you would slowly enrich and end up with
[a lava] that was really pretty rich in [sulfur].
Ross-Nazzal:
Would you tell us how that team worked? My understanding, at least
for when you went by Saturn, was the team consisted of 26 people.
I don’t know if there were that many for Jupiter. How did you
operate? Were there a lot of debates about what you were seeing? How
did you reach a consensus?
Beebe:
This is true on the Cassini mission [to Saturn] right now as well.
At JPL you have people who have a lot of responsibility on certain
areas. As far as imaging went, Candy [Candice] Hansen [now Hansen-Koharcheck]
was the tech [technician] who was really a coordinator. There was
another fellow who worked with her, Jimmy [L.] Mitchell, who eventually
died of [HIV/]AIDS [human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired
immune deficiency syndrome]. Those kids basically were responsible
for a lot of the organization.
There’s more than 27 people, by the way. There’s a crew
behind each one of those guys. They’re the big shots. What you
do is you develop areas of expertise, so you’ve got subcommittees,
and all of this goes on long before you do the observations. You do
the planning, and then you have got to bring these druthers together
so that they will fit in a schedule.
A guy named Ellis [D.] Miner at JPL was a really good coordinator
for that problem. When you’re doing that problem, you’ve
got really bitter battles going on, because maybe that’s the
only time they can possibly get that [observation], and they’re
going to lose it to somebody else. There’s a lot of fighting
and compromise. We would fight to a certain point, and then Ellis
would call, “That’s the end of that.” He would go
off and then very carefully try to do some refits by putting compromises
in, then bring it back to us. It was always better than what he had
left with and allowed much more to be gotten out of it.
You worked with people who were the experts and who were defending
their turf, being coordinated by somebody who’s interested in
getting the most they possibly can out of the mission. That’s
pretty well-tuned in terms of how these missions are run.
Ross-Nazzal:
Can you give us an example of something that was hotly debated, or
something that you felt strongly about on Voyager?
Beebe:
One of them I remember working to coordinate—it was interesting
because when we first started I was supposed to be representing imaging,
and the person who was representing the infrared spectrometer thought
I was really in competition with him. After we had had a few rounds,
it became pretty apparent that I didn’t have to be in competition.
I could be supportive, because he had low spatial resolution and high
resolution in terms of wavelength, or color, in the infrared. I had
far better spatial resolution than he had, but I didn’t have
much resolution in terms of color.
If we were to target together, then I could put constraints on his
observations and he could put constraints on mine. So as we began
to really develop the early part of the targeting, it became apparent
that there were these combinations that you could put together that
would actually yield a lot more solid science.
The thing that is hard for people to remember is there’s more
compute power in this [smartphone] than there was in the entire JPL
lab when we flew these things. The Voyager memory was very, very small.
It had a front end and a back end. You loaded the front end and checked
it to make certain that you got it going, and you turned it on. Then
you loaded the back end and checked it and hoped that you were finished
before it was going to slide into the back end, so you could load
the front end again. You were constantly working these uploads which
were very, very limited in terms of the number of bits you could have
in your upload.
The result was that a lot of the targeting we did was done by little
routines which might do a two-by-two look in three colors. The only
option you had was where you were going to set it and what filters
you were going to put in there to get the colors. The rest of it was
hardwired. By doing this, we got much more efficient. It was funny
as the mission went on, because we would listen to stuff coming back
from the press about our artificial intelligence and the wonderful
things that Voyager did. It was all bullwork. You had so little memory
that you thought out every piece that you had to fit it in.
Now on Cassini we’ve got lots more memory, so what problems
do you have with Cassini? First of all, the Deep Space Net is not
infinite. So you’ve always got to worry about how many bits
you can drop at a given time. You’re right back at the same
thing. You’re right back to you plan the thing and they look
at it, and “Oops, we can’t download that.” “Okay,
you guys, you got to cut back. Where can you cut back?” It doesn’t
matter how many resources you give a team, there’s always this
problem of having to give and take to get where you want to go to
really optimize things.
Ross-Nazzal:
How far in advance were you coming up with these steps? Was this five
minutes out from a photo, or are you talking days?
Beebe:
Oh no, we’re talking days when we could do the loads. It was
because we had these little units that were really efficient that
we could pack it that tight. The result is that you fight like crazy.
You become brothers and sisters. You fight like crazy, but don’t
let anybody else try to do anything to us. To this day I can be sitting
here in a telecom, and we don’t have to identify ourselves.
We know each other’s voices to the point that it’s just
open conversation.
Ross-Nazzal:
One of the people that I noticed was on the [Voyager] list was Carl
[E.] Sagan. He was very much a public figure at that time. What did
you think, being an academic, about having him on the team and his
push to get public interest in the mission?
Beebe:
It’s the public’s money. If a mission doesn’t give
it to the public, there’s something wrong at NASA Headquarters
[Washington, DC] as far as I’m concerned. Because that’s
the whole thing. The stimulation that this can have for kids and for
the public, understanding the worlds that they live in, is the real
justification for doing it. I have real admiration for the people
who do this well.
Carl was a strange guy, pretty lovable in lots of ways. I can tell
you some interesting incidents about him. Carolyn [C.] Porco, who
is on the imaging team for Cassini, has tried to emulate Carl. She
has worked her tail off, and she has come up with some wonderful things.
The last one she came up with was she had her team schedule to look
through the rings of Saturn to the Earth. You’ve got the rings
of Saturn, and there’s one little bitty spot that is the Earth.
It gives kids some concept of how far away you really are. I think
she’s doing a great job with it.
Carl worked hard at it. When we were doing the Saturn encounters,
Carl was working on Cosmos [A Personal Voyage television series],
so he wasn’t there very much. But he waltzed in and took over
the press. Then he started to feel guilty about this, so he gave us
a party at his studio. He put out a spread—I don’t know
where he found the caterer, but as far as I was concerned they came
straight from heaven. It was just wonderful stuff. The centerpiece
of it was this giant chocolate Saturn with spun sugar rings.
The entertainment was that he showed us how he did special effects
in the movie, set up the cameras. We got to walk through his “cathedral”
as we called it. We gave him a bad time about that. We also gave him
a bad time about the fact that his face shows up so often. Carl called
that cheap fill, but the public loves it. They love to really be able
to identify with someone who’s doing it.
I used to ask him about his little daughter, who was his last child,
and one time he said that he was jealous. She was five, she had a
boyfriend.
When we were doing the second Saturn encounter I took my nephew, who
was 11 years old, with me. I had him in my office the day before the
press arrived. I couldn’t have had him there the day, but he
was there the day before watching stuff come down. I realized he was
missing. “Oh shit, where’s the kid?” Then I heard
Carl’s voice down the hall. “I hope you appreciate what
your aunt has done. This is like being invited along on [Christopher]
Columbus’s second voyage.” I walked down the hall. As
I walked down, I picked up my Polaroid camera and Carl gladly posed
with his arm around the kid. What was interesting is this had caused
enough of a rumple in the group that quite a few of the techs had
come down to see what was going on. They all happily posed and got
their pictures with Carl.
Ross-Nazzal:
I remember the TV show from my younger years as a child, so I was
curious about that. Did you guys ever encounter any problems with
the spacecraft and have to do things on the fly to ensure that you
would secure these wonderful images that you got?
Beebe:
During the Saturn encounter (the second encounter of Voyager 2), a
lot of the observations that I was depending on to really define the
wind field, the rate at which the clouds appeared to drift, were lost.
As we flew by, we were so busy slewing here and slewing there that
we warmed up the system enough that the lubricants became ineffective
and it froze. There was a period of time where the engineers were
essentially hammering it, getting it to go this way and this way and
this way, to break it loose.
They broke it loose, but then we had lost a whole section of the observations
observing Saturn in green light where you could see the tops of some
of the cloud decks that were visible. But we got it back into operation
again to get the really high phase angle which allows you to understand
the structure of the atmosphere where it’s really thin. You’ve
got to be able to look through and get the forward scattering from
the Sun to do that, and we got it back into operation for that.
Ross-Nazzal:
That must have been nerve-wracking.
Beebe:
They’re unhappy, stressful times when you have that going on.
Any time the spacecraft goes into safe [mode], it’s tough.
Ross-Nazzal:
Especially if you’re counting on that data.
Beebe:
It’s not only that. These spacecraft develop personalities,
and you get emotionally hooked to the thing somehow.
Ross-Nazzal:
Really? Would you tell us about the personality of Voyager 1 and 2?
Beebe:
You should have seen us when we went by Neptune. The last day, when
the press was dissolving, we’re all crying. Can’t keep
it in anymore.
Ross-Nazzal:
I can imagine. You’ve been with that project for so long.
Beebe:
Yes. Now I’m working with the team to recover all of the documentation
from Cassini, and you can see it building into this team, too. They’re
going to kill their baby.
JOHNSON:
I imagine that’s hard.
Ross-Nazzal:
Yes, all the time and effort you put in. That’s challenging.
I wanted to ask you—I found a quote from Bradford that basically
said, “Everything we are seeing on Saturn is brand new.”
I was curious about that. What did you learn on Voyager 2? Why didn’t
we know that much about Saturn?
Beebe:
Let me see if I can find you one [image]. Herb sent me one [demonstrates].
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s beautiful.
Beebe:
But you can’t see anything. Oh they’re lovely. Here’s
another one [demonstrates].
Ross-Nazzal:
Oh, that’s a big difference.
Beebe:
That’s his colored one, but you still can’t see clouds.
You can’t see any of the dynamics that are going on very easily.
You’ve got to get to very high resolution, and you’ve
got to get as far out in the infrared as you can. The cameras that
we had on Voyager were red-blind. You could see out into the orange,
and that was about as far as you could go. So we used a very broadband
green filter, and at high resolution you could see faint cloud tops.
But nothing like you could see on Jupiter, where the clouds would
roll and move and you could see the interactions.
We didn’t have anything that good from the Earth when we were
observing. Our cameras were less sensitive. We had to expose for longer
periods of time. The jiggling of the Earth’s atmosphere smoothed
everything out for us. An English amateur was bragging to me today
that he’s got a new camera that’s 100 times more sensitive
than the previous one, which means he’ll cut his exposures and
be able to catch those [times when the atmosphere is quiet].
With the computer systems that they have, you can do what they call
an edge finder. You can come in and select the ones where the brightness
changes the most steeply, and those are your best resolution. You
can throw the others all away, and you can coadd those. You can build
up the signal and beat down the noise by coadding them. So these guys,
they just ratchet it as they’re going, and then they go through
and only pick the good ones and put them together. They’re doing
wonderful things.
JOHNSON:
These are amateurs? Is that what you said?
Beebe:
These are amateurs. These are guys that are not planetary scientists,
they’re engineers and that sort of thing.
Ross-Nazzal:
That’s a ground-based photo?
Beebe:
Yes.
JOHNSON:
It’s amazing.
Ross-Nazzal:
I know. I wouldn’t think you’d be able to see that from
Earth.
Beebe:
Maybe that one [demonstrates]. That’s a Jupiter image that he
gets, and you can see [many] more structures. Let me see if I can
find one that’s got the Red Spot on it for you.
JOHNSON:
Amazing.
Ross-Nazzal:
I know, it’s amazing, that it’s here on this planet. Oh,
look at that.
Beebe:
Here’s the Red Spot coming off this. They’re doing tremendous
stuff, and we use it. If we use it, they get to coauthor the paper.
Ross-Nazzal:
If you use their image, they get to coauthor the paper? I’ve
never heard of such a thing.
Beebe:
It’s their data. It’s not just an image, it’s data.
If it tells us something that helps us integrate into the stuff we’re
working, they get the credit. They also monitor for things like stuff
falling in [the atmosphere], although they haven’t gotten a
good one of those lately.
JOHNSON:
How many are out there doing that?
Beebe:
This [organization] is called ALPO. It’s the [Association of]
Lunar and Planetary [Observers]. It’s gone universal. There’s
a biologist in London who is the coordinator of it now. It used to
be a guy that worked over here. But now [John H.] Rogers [Ph.D. Jupiter
Section Director, British Astronomical Association] is the coordinator,
and they share it all backward and forth. He writes various reviews
where he combines [input from the amateurs].
On the Juno mission [to Jupiter], the camera is not rated as a scientific
instrument. It’s getting information and we’re archiving
the images that it gets, but it was designed for public education.
Those images are put on a website where people can access them and
process them and work with them. So these people now on ALPO are working
on Jupiter, and they’re using the Juno data and their own data
and arguing back and forth. They’re having a great time.
Ross-Nazzal:
They include you of course.
Beebe:
Yes. I can be sitting here working in the evening, and I will get
images that were taken tomorrow.
Ross-Nazzal:
Things have definitely changed over the years. That was one of the
things that I wanted to ask you about. I know that you coauthored
an article for Science about what you learned about Jupiter with many
of the people on your team. I wondered, how did that work in the ’70s?
Of course today we have e-mail, or even earlier we had fax machines.
How did you sit down and coauthor an article so quickly about what
you had learned and worked together?
Beebe:
What you would do is you’d put together an outline, and you
would assign tasks to do this piece, do this piece, do this piece,
and there was a main editor. The main author would be the editor,
and you would generate your components and send it to him. He would
integrate it, then you would circulate it. Pre-fax, we could send
short bits and pieces backward and forth in the early one. Then we
got up to being able to actually transmit things.
This computer that’s sitting over there [points] is a relic.
There was an electrical engineer who built a board that’s in
that computer, and he understood the whole structure of it. His board
has little arrays in it that are 256 by 256 [pixels]. It turns out
that the images from Voyager aren’t much better than that, so
it was really quite useful.
The way he set it up, you can use that board to make a movie. You
could process eight different images, and then blink through them
to see things moving. When he helped us put that together—at
that point in time we were taking such huge steps forward in the computer
industry that that made us competitive with JPL, with their full-up
lab. That little guy could do as much as JPL could when we went by
Jupiter.
We used that a lot. We could navigate the images. We could map-project
them. We would do all sorts of useful things with it. That meant that
my students could work a lot on the data. By the time we were working
on Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, we had the full projection capability,
so we were really moving forward.
Ross-Nazzal:
That gets to something else I was curious about, about using the data.
Once those images were down, did you bring them back with you? Or
how were you able to access them?
Beebe:
On tapes.
Ross-Nazzal:
On magnetic tape?
Beebe:
Yes.
Ross-Nazzal:
How big were those tapes at that point?
Beebe:
This big [demonstrates size, about 12 inches in diameter]. They came
in boxes.
Ross-Nazzal:
How would you transport them back? Or did they send them?
Beebe:
We shipped them.
Ross-Nazzal:
What sort of equipment—you weren’t using that computer
at that point, were you? You were using something else then?
Beebe:
I had a tape reader here. It was almost as big as that table. That
way I could read the tapes.
Ross-Nazzal:
Did everyone on the team get a set of these tapes to take back with
them?
Beebe:
No, you ordered the ones you needed. You had your plan, and you would
say, “Okay, now I want to study the Red Spot, and I need these
images.” They would load those onto the tape for you. Then you
had the set that you were working with. You would end up with a dozen
tapes for your project. By the time I got this [computer], then we
could put them on floppies [floppy disks].
Ross-Nazzal:
The big three-and-a-half-by-five-[inch] floppies?
Beebe:
No, little floppies. Little ones that really packed the data in neatly.
Yes, the little colored box you see over there is the reader for one
of those floppies.
Ross-Nazzal:
Things have changed. How long were you working with Voyager data?
Are you still working with Voyager data from Jupiter and Saturn?
Beebe:
I’m not, but people still are. Now they’re comparing it
with Cassini. Occasionally they’re finding weird things in it
that weren’t found before.
Ross-Nazzal:
There was a book that was written by Henry S. F. Cooper [Jr.] called
Imaging Saturn [The Voyager Flights to Saturn]. He followed around
quite a few of you. I was wondering what you thought about that book
and his inclusion as you were working on the project.
Beebe:
Henry was an interesting guy. Press like Henry, who were not going
to write tomorrow’s scoop, were given quite a bit of access
just to come in and sit in meetings and do that kind of thing. They
signed that they weren’t going to do scoops and releases, so
he spent a lot of time with us. The joke about Henry was he would
come into the room and he would say, “What did you discover
today?” You’d look at the download, somebody’d come
in, “Well, what did you discover today?” sort of thing.
Ross-Nazzal:
What would you tell him?
Beebe:
If we had something good we would explain what we had to him, but
that was always his opening line. I remember one time he wrote an
article—or it’s in that book, I’ve forgotten which—where
he describes me as brown-haired and mid-40’s. Some of the people
at JPL were taking offense. He was offended, because he had tried
to be as honest as he could be. Didn’t bother me at all, because
it was true.
Ross-Nazzal:
I did wonder about that myself when I read those passages. What did
you think of his portrayal of the events and the people?
Beebe:
I thought he did fairly well. What was interesting is that he caught
me—that was when we were going by Neptune, right, that he did
that?
Ross-Nazzal:
I think it was Saturn when he wrote the book, but he may have done
some articles on Neptune.
Beebe:
He did Neptune too, because I walked into the room and I said to Andy
[Andrew P.] Ingersoll—and I forgot that Henry was there—“I
wonder why God likes the southern hemisphere?” Because we had
this big blue spot [Great Dark Spot] on Neptune, and again it was
in the southern hemisphere. Andy said something back to me.
Henry included this in the thing that he reported, and it was picked
up by the Wall Street Journal. It ended up in the left-hand side.
It’s important to get into that section. It was amazing how
many contacts I had from people I had known previously who were nowhere
near planetary science, who were stunned to realize that I was there.
When you make that corner, apparently you’ve arrived.
Ross-Nazzal:
I imagine it was a big deal for you to be on the team, being from
New Mexico State University.
Beebe:
Voyager was extremely popular here. When they were getting ready to
bring down the data from Neptune we actually used the VLA as well.
Ross-Nazzal:
What’s the VLA?
Beebe:
The [Karl G. Jansky] Very Large Array, the radio telescope [in central
New Mexico]. We actually used it for some of our dump because we were
far enough away now the signal was really weak. Ellis Miner came out,
and they had this big thing for the press about the fact that they
were using the VLA and how great it was. He said that he was really
surprised at how well informed our press was.
Ross-Nazzal:
Here in New Mexico?
Beebe:
Yes, he’d been doing lots of press. He encountered the people
here, and he was really impressed with what they were after in terms
of understanding it. The university, for each of the four planets,
had me select the best, prettiest image of the planet. They reproduced
them and framed them and delivered them to every member of the legislature.
They were on the walls of the legislature, and a lot of them had all
four of them on the wall. It was big.
Galileo was crippled, so we had problems with it. But Cassini hasn’t
tweaked the public’s imagination like Voyager. You’ve
got to go where no man has gone before to really turn them on. As
you saw with Pluto, Pluto was big.
Ross-Nazzal:
It was big. I wonder if that has to do with the fact that there was
so much debate going on about whether or not it was a planet.
Beebe:
That certainly had made the public aware that it was something out
there. Then for it to have such interesting character, to have been
demoted and then be that interesting.
Ross-Nazzal:
Those images that you picked, were those four of your favorite images?
Do you have a favorite image from Voyager?
Beebe:
They were picked to be pretty and to be readily recognizable. It was
the full image of the planet that was selected for those.
My favorite images have to do with the Red Spot. There was this wonderful
little girl, I think she was at Pasadena City College [California],
she was black. She was one of my support people. When we would get
a high resolution view of a cloud area, we would do a mosaic to get
it. They would print these up, [using] a really crude printing method,
and then she would trim them and paste them so we could see the whole
mosaic.
She came into my office with a pile of these one day, and she said,
“I have absolutely no idea what to do with these.”
I looked at them. “Oh, oh, oh. What we’re doing here is
we’re doing a scan. We’re in so close now to the planet
that we’re doing a scan inside of the Red Spot. So when you
get this put together you’ll be the first human being to ever
have seen the Red Spot at this spatial resolution.”
There was a fellow [scientist] on the team, Garry [E.] Hunt, a Brit,
who was [involved in a lot of] PR. He really worked at it, too. She
disappeared, and she came running back in and she said, “Reta,
Reta, come look at this.” He realized that she had something
outstanding. I followed her in, and we’re leaning over the table,
looking at it. He comes in the door, and she looks up at him. She
says, “Hey, white boy, do you want to be the first male to ever
look at this?”
Ross-Nazzal:
I’m sure she got a good laugh out of that.
Beebe:
I did. He did too. He thought she was wonderful.
Ross-Nazzal:
If you have a copy of that image, we’ll have to get one and
put it with your oral history. I’m sure you have it readily
available.
Beebe:
It’s up there. [Points] That one on the board.
Ross-Nazzal:
That longish one?
Beebe:
Yes, that’s faded.
Ross-Nazzal:
I would not have guessed that that was Jupiter.
Beebe:
It’s probably available at JPL. They’ve probably got the
pasteup of that one.
Ross-Nazzal:
We’ll have to see if we can get the number, so we don’t
pick the wrong [image].
Beebe:
I don’t have a number on it. You just ask them for the highest
spatial resolution of the Red Spot out of Voyager.
Ross-Nazzal:
I will do that.
Beebe:
The infrared spectrometer was observing along with that, so that really
was a good data set.
Ross-Nazzal:
What did you learn from Voyager about Jupiter and Saturn? What were
some of the key things that you found?
Beebe:
When we were trying to do it with ground-based [telescopes], they
were much less useful than this. There’s one there [demonstrates]
that would be about as good as you got with the old cameras that we
had. We would get measurements, but we got them by doing it for several
days and then doing a fit to it. There were all sorts of arguments
that what we were getting wasn’t real, because things could
change and we could have been looking at various things. A cloud can
be translating, it can be expanding, it can be evaporating, it can
be rolling and changing. The measurements we got were always in question.
With the two encounters of Jupiter, we got really dense measurements
of cloud motion. You could start to take this apart and understand
what was translation, what was wind motion, and what was cloud evolution.
That was the big yield in terms of the work that I was doing, because
I was working on the dynamics of the atmosphere.
With Saturn, from the ground-based [telescopes], as you can see even
with these guys [demonstrates], you have to wait till there’s
a major event, and that is not typical of the wind field in the clouds.
You don’t get enough resolution on Uranus and Neptune, even
now, to be able to resolve the actual cloud translation. Again, even
now with the best stuff we’ve got, you’re working on cloud
events instead of the overall dynamics of the system. So what we got
that was of real interest to me was a lot more information that would
either say yea or nay about ideas of the dynamics of the system.
Then we got Galileo, with its broken antenna and a good camera. Better
than the Voyager, and capable of looking farther out into the red.
What we got there is that map that you see there [demonstrates] with
the little colored spots on it. Those are the high resolution views
we got with Galileo, with its broken antenna. You really had to work,
but what you got was a kind of resolution that you could fold into
the Voyager and you could keep working on this.
Then we had a Cassini flyby that had some very nice data, and now
we’ve got the amateur cameras coming in. The amateur cameras
give us very interesting information on dynamics. When you work with
the images the way they’re doing it, you destroy much of the
color information. You just don’t constrain them the way you
should. They put edge finders and sharpeners on them, but the dynamics
are still there. Starting with Voyager, now we’ve got these
broken sections and some ground-based follow-up, and Juno [data] coming
in, that fill in quite interestingly.
I’m not really doing that anymore. The major thing I spend doing
is trying to document the data and make certain that it’s well-archived.
Ross-Nazzal:
I did want to talk about that tomorrow. Because that sounds really
important, we understand that.
Beebe:
That’s hard work.
Ross-Nazzal:
It sounds like it, making sure everything’s consistent. I wanted
to ask about Uranus and Neptune. It was many years later, you had
to wait until the flybys. I was curious, were there still the same
people on the imaging science team, or had some people retired or
passed away? Did things change?
Beebe:
Some of them had retired, some of them had died. Some of them had
done some pretty interesting things. Linda [J.] Spilker, who is the
project scientist for Cassini now, was a tech on Voyager. During these
breaks she got a Ph.D. out of UCLA [University of California, Los
Angeles]. So did Candy Hansen. They worked on every encounter and
have continued to work on missions as they go. So you saw that development
among the techs that were working with us at the time.
Some of the people retired right afterward. But, for a large part
people lasted for the whole time. They did other things in the meantime.
Because most of them were profs [professors] at universities, they’d
been stretching themselves for the encounters to start with, so now
they could do some research on the data. NASA kept us well enough
funded to support graduate students so work could go forward.
Ross-Nazzal:
Were you there for the flyby of Uranus?
Beebe:
Yes.
Ross-Nazzal:
What are your memories of that moment?
Beebe:
Frustration.
Ross-Nazzal:
Why is that?
Beebe:
As a dynamist, I need to see clouds and I didn’t. It was just
pretty. Just a beautiful blue ball when you turned it.
Ross-Nazzal:
Did you get any information at all that was helpful to your studies?
Beebe:
Very, very little. We got a hint that the rotation was quite different
than Jupiter and Saturn. On Jupiter and Saturn the equatorward winds
translate eastward, and on these two others it’s such that they
translate westward. You don’t develop the full multiple cells
that you do on these warmer big planets. You get large cells that
are more like big turnover cells. We did get that out of them.
They’ve continued to monitor infrared and use HST [Hubble Space
Telescope] and its red capabilities. JWST [James Webb Space Telescope]
is going to be able to reach and get better spatial resolution, so
there’ll be more dynamical studies on those too with JWST.
Ross-Nazzal:
One thing I noticed was that fairly soon after the flyby, Challenger
[STS 51-L Space Shuttle disaster] happened. What are your memories
of that? I understand that the press conference pretty much fizzled
as a result.
Beebe:
Yes. There was a guy named Bob Martin, and he was like a soldier of
fortune. He did a lot of really good freelance reporting. Bob would
show up wherever there was a war, and you would see a bit coming in
on different stations from Bob. He wore a flak jacket and carried
everything he needed to shoot on his body. He worked as my press agent
during the Uranus encounter. He had cleared himself with the PR people,
with the promise that he would not report on anything except my activity
that he was following around. He wanted to do a “day at Uranus”
kind of thing.
He had been around a bit during Saturn. The PR people found him very
easy to work with. They said that he could spend most of the day walking
around with me, and then he would go over to their place and use some
of their equipment to uplink his edited versions to all the sources
that he was putting them out to. They said that he did the same work
that five or six people for most of the other PR teams did. He was
really impressive in the way he could do it.
He was with me, and we went into an auditorium full of people to watch
the [Challenger] launch. It blew up, and you’re sitting among
people that know exactly what happened. It was a long period of time
when no one said anything. Then you could hear people starting to
cry and get up and walk out. Bob never said anything about it. He
never reported on it, even though it was probably one of the wildest
things he had ever seen. He had signed his paper, and he stuck with
it.
Ross-Nazzal:
That was a difficult time for the Agency.
Beebe:
Yes, it was.
Ross-Nazzal:
Did things change on the ground as you were working with images and
how you got images? As we talked about today, technology on the ground
changed. Of course the spacecraft couldn’t change, we couldn’t
go out into space and make changes to it. But I’m curious, were
there changes?
Beebe:
The engineers got smarter and smarter about how far they could push
it. They figured out how to lengthen exposures as we went outward.
The spacecraft didn’t change, the crew evolved. The more they
learned about it, and the more sure they got that they could push
it, the more they could get out of it.
Ross-Nazzal:
But not enough for you.
Beebe:
There’s never enough; there’s never enough.
Ross-Nazzal:
What about Neptune? Were you out there for Neptune, or were you here?
Beebe:
Yes, I was there for Neptune. The neatest thing—I remember being
told that what I was saying couldn’t possibly be true.
Ross-Nazzal:
What were you seeing?
Beebe:
I was seeing clouds disappear before my eyes. At these temperatures,
they certainly couldn’t be evaporating. That’s still a
question.
We were seeing some upwellings in the atmosphere. The motion of the
atmosphere would carry up and over, and you would get a condensation.
Then it would disappear when the stuff descended again. That’s
all perfectly logical, except it was so damn cold out there that it’s
really hard to figure out how those clouds disappeared once they formed.
They definitely were doing that, and it took us quite a while to finally
say, “Hey, we got to stick our neck out and say this is true,
and we don’t really understand how you can get rid of the stuff
that quickly.”
What are the clouds composed of? Then you get into really complex
things, because the type of crystal that forms will really control
things, and creating that environment in a lab is not easy. So there’s
still questions on what was going on. When we first started saying,
“This is what we’re saying,” the theorists on the
team were going, “No, it can’t be true. It can’t
be true. We can’t say that.”
Ross-Nazzal:
Those were some big debates. What are the temperatures like on that
planet?
Beebe:
It’s 30 times as far from the Sun as the Earth. For a given
area on that planet, it’s getting one-nine-hundredth of the
radiation that the Earth is getting. The solar heating is almost nil,
though there’s still some internal heating coming up. I’ve
forgotten what the temperature is, but the heat sources are really
low out there. It’s cold. You’re not going to see water,
that’s way down below. You’re going to see other things
that are being pushed up, maybe. Ammonia ices, methane ices.
Ross-Nazzal:
You had told us previously when the Neptune flyby was over, people
were pretty sad. At JSC, when there’s the end of a mission there’s
usually a splashdown party. Did you guys have any sort of event to
mark that occasion?
Beebe:
We just sort of went away. We were so damn tired by the time the press
left, we just sort of collapsed. Picked up our tapes and went home.
Ross-Nazzal:
You were still using tapes for Neptune or had things changed?
Beebe:
I forget what we were transporting on at that time. I think it was
still tapes that we were using.
Ross-Nazzal:
Still magnetic tapes?
Beebe:
I think so. I’ll have to check that because I can’t recall
what I was moving things on then.
Ross-Nazzal:
While you were working on Voyager and in between the Saturn and Uranus
encounters, what sort of things were you working on [at NMSU]? You
were working with graduate students obviously. Were you primarily
working with the Voyager data and doing publications?
Beebe:
I was teaching undergraduates, and I was working with graduate students,
leading them through their research. I had a lot of PR going. The
Voyager was really demanding along that sort of thing.
One of the other things I did, which was lots of fun, is that there’s
a unit on the planets in the local school system. Either in third
or fourth grade they study the planets, and I would go into the classrooms
with the kids and talk about my favorite pictures. The kids were really
funny. There’s Mesilla Park Elementary School over here, and
I went to that one. The teacher was wonderful. In their curriculum,
the kids are supposed to write a letter to someone requesting something.
They’re supposed to, of course, have an outside person, and
they’re supposed to write a thank-you note.
She put those all together, and she contacted me. I suggested three
different topics I could talk about. Then the kids picked the one
that they wanted. So I put my presentation together. I got there,
and I was met at the car by three little kids who helped me take all
of my stuff in and set it up. The teacher sat in the back of the room
with a smile on her face. Another little kid welcomed me. I did my
presentation, and another little kid took over for questions. Of course,
they had preconceived questions because they knew what the topic was
going to be.
Then, when it was almost over, this little boy—he was a tiny
little thing—was assigned to take me down and introduce me to
the principal. We’re walking down the hall, and he had wrapped
up my hand and tucked it in his tiny little hand, and he’s leading
me down the hall. He looked up at me and he said, “Do you ever
call in sick?” I said, “I don’t remember ever doing
that.” He said, “I didn’t think so.”
Ross-Nazzal:
What a great memory. That must have been a lot of fun working with
schoolkids.
Beebe:
They were, yes. They were so unpredictable and so smart. One of the
things I thought was really cute was they would ask me how big the
solar system was. When they were trying to understand that they would
just shiver.
Ross-Nazzal:
Too much to handle?
Beebe:
But their faces would be all lit up as they were trying to do it.
Ross-Nazzal:
I think I had read on the Hubble Space Telescope [Science] Institute
that a fourth grader got in an argument with you about your job and
whether or not anyone would pay you to do this kind of work, which
I found amusing. She just thought this should be a hobby? Or what
was her argument?
Beebe:
That’s right. These kids come from families that have jobs that
are labor. It just surprised her that somebody would pay you to have
fun.
Ross-Nazzal:
It’s a fascinating career. You mentioned you were doing a lot
of PR work for Voyager. Would you tell us about that, not being at
JPL, but being here in Las Cruces? What did that involve?
Beebe:
It’s amazing how many different organizations there are that
are looking for speakers. You would end up doing Rotary [International
service club] or something else like that. They’re the taxpayers—it’s
their mission, it’s not mine. So you owe it to them really.
It’s hard work to find the time to do it, but it’s always
really rewarding to talk to the people and see their reactions.
Ross-Nazzal:
In the early ’80s under President [Ronald W.] Reagan there was
some discussion about whether or not the country could afford the
Galileo mission. For a while, there was some question about whether
or not it was going to be funded. Do you remember that time period
and whether or not you were involved in discussions about the value
of that mission?
Beebe:
I remember a lot of time periods like that. That happens almost every
time that we come up with a flagship mission that’s going to
cost $4 or 5 billion. Even now, any mission that costs more than $1
billion is highly controversial whether it should be done or whether
it shouldn’t be done. The main controversy usually is whether
they should commit themselves to such an expensive project and whether
it’s going to fit in the budget. Yes, that happened then. Happened
again with Cassini.
The original Cassini mission was a mission to Saturn and a mission
to a comet using the same kind of high-powered observation. By the
time we got the Cassini mission finally funded, the comet mission
had disappeared forever. The Cassini mission had been stripped back
to the point that it had no scan platform. Voyager has that platform
that sticks out so you can do this [scan] while other instruments
are doing other things.
Cassini looks like a porcupine. Everything is on it, and every time
you want to go, you’ve got to roll the whole telescope. The
operations of Cassini are much more complex. It was because of budget
cuts. The engineers [kept] getting more and more inventive to keep
the mission alive as the costs of it were just driven, down, and down
to try to get it into the budget.
This goes on all the time. It’s been going on now with the Europa
[Clipper] mission [to Jupiter’s Europa moon]. Whether it’s
going to have a lander, whether it’s not going to have a lander,
how much money you’re going to put into it. I personally would
have liked to see it have a lander. The amount of information we would
have got going forward would have been much larger. But costing these
things out and getting approval of the chunk is always a major step
forward.
Ross-Nazzal:
Has there been anything that you found as a researcher, as a scientist,
that really helped bureaucrats or Congress to say, “Oh, this
is really beneficial. This is worthwhile investing in those sort of
projects”?
Beebe:
I can’t think of any specific thing that I found. I think probably
the biggest support I have given is the PR that I have done over the
years. One of the reasons that NASA stays in pretty good shape in
terms of budgets is that it’s got suppliers in almost every
state. It’s got a very large educational outreach, so in the
legislature you’ve got supporters for something that is important
to their local people. The selling of these missions is really important
in terms of keeping public support and keeping enough money in NASA
that you’ve got some sort of a reasonable ongoing approach to
things.
Ross-Nazzal:
Around the time of Galileo, of course NASA was supporting the Space
Shuttle. They had been building and designing the spacecraft for many
years, and it flew for the first time in ’81. It was supposed
to launch Galileo, but we had some problems, we had Challenger. What
sort of impact did that have on your role in the mission?
Beebe:
Because I was involved in a university, a mission was more of an overburden.
I certainly could find 100 percent of my time fully occupied with
what the university expected from me and student demands. It represented
a delay of when things were going to turn on. I didn’t have
any graduate student who was absolutely dependent on getting data
out of that at that point in time, so there was no student who was
deeply impacted by the delays.
The fact that the delays and the transporting of the spacecraft backward
and forth jammed the antenna really threw a clinker in what we were
planning to do. The [resolution of] the data that was downloaded from
Galileo was superb, but the amount that we could get down was really
small. The engineers did their very best to understand how to compress
the data. The teams did their very best to select observations that
would have the highest yield, but it was a tough ongoing sort of thing.
Ross-Nazzal:
So you did not get much from that mission?
Beebe:
No, I didn’t. But, by that time I was working at NASA Headquarters.
Actually, while I was at Headquarters I ran the grants program for
the data reduction of Galileo. So I saw what the guys were doing in
terms of the whole thing.
Ross-Nazzal:
I was curious if you could talk a little bit about how—you’re
a faculty member here at New Mexico State University, but you’re
provided funds by NASA but also state funds. I’m curious how
that works. How is that allocated? Like you said, you found 110 percent
of your time could be spent just working on university stuff, but
you still had NASA requirements that you had to meet. How does that
all work together so that you are not trying to work two jobs?
Beebe:
Since May of ’97, I haven’t had any state money. I’ve
been supported by NASA, at whatever level I’ve been supported,
by whatever jobs I’ve been doing. Before that I was supposed
to have a reduced teaching load, but so are most of the faculty in
the department because of recognition that research is very critical.
New Mexico State has three roles. One is to educate anyone who comes
through your door. The second one is to do creative research. The
third one is to educate the public off-site, essentially. You continue
to do those things. If your research leads you to heavy commitments,
you just figure out a way to stretch it. If I had been a mother, I
would have probably been called in by social workers for abandonment.
The fact that I was married to another astronomer, [we] compromised.
He retired early and had a marvelous time traveling. He wasn’t
complaining. It was full commitment, and it just sort of eats you
up. Of course I did some really neat things while I was being eaten
up.
Ross-Nazzal:
When you were working on Voyager, how much funding was NASA providing
you versus state funding? Was it half and half? Half your time technically
was supposed to go to NASA? Obviously that didn’t work out.
Beebe:
No, it was less than a quarter time that NASA provided. And travel,
[NASA] covered all the travel that I had to do.
Ross-Nazzal:
That also provided funding for your graduate students?
Beebe:
Yes. That’s the big piece that makes the university happy, that
you have that sort of thing coming in.
Ross-Nazzal:
You’ve supervised quite a few graduate students over the years.
Beebe:
I had 13. They’re retiring now.
Ross-Nazzal:
And here you are still working. You’re still having fun, right?
Beebe:
Yes.
Ross-Nazzal:
When I was looking at Galileo, I read you were providing contextual
images based on the Hubble Space Telescope. I was confused by that
statement because I didn’t know how that would work. The Hubble
Space Telescope wasn’t deployed till 1990 but Galileo was launched
in ’89, I believe. I was curious, did that in fact happen? Would
you talk to us about that?
Beebe:
That’s what we could do in terms of mapping the planet with
Galileo. While we were getting that, we were getting observations
from the Hubble Space Telescope. Those were global, so you could embed
these high resolution ones into the lower resolution, and get a higher
yield out of it.
Ross-Nazzal:
I misunderstood the media. I was confused, I was thinking you were
providing them before the Galileo mission left. I had also read that
there was a contest that you participated in where you were looking
at where the Galileo probe had entered Jupiter. You were offering
a student a chance to look at one rotation of Jupiter, and you would
help them with the analysis. Do you recall [that contest]?
Beebe:
My story on that is that I had two students, Nancy [J.] Chanover,
who’s one of our faculty now, and Amy [A.] Simon-[Miller], who
is at [NASA] Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland]. They
went to JPL for the summer school program that JPL provides for graduate
students, and they came back having met David [H.] Atkinson, who was
on the Saturn probe. As graduate students will do, they informed me
that I should help David, help him understand where he was entering.
Amy worked with me closely on that. Amy was the student who did that
sort of thing. If you want to get her input on it, you can ask her
about it.
We weren’t particularly happy with the press releases where
they called the entry point the “mother of all hot spots.”
We were working closely with David, and the wind field he was getting,
as you went down, would have smeared that thing out. It couldn’t
have been a system that developed and was static, but the implication
by saying it was the mother of all hot spots was that it was some
sort of static feature similar to Red Spot. Instead, it’s a
wave operation that’s expansion, cooling, that kind of thing.
That came later, but what was happening was that we had recommended
that the probe be put in right at the equator, because they wanted
a typical entry point. But as the mission was delayed, the location
where you could put the probe in kept shifting northward. By the time
Galileo got there, it dumped into probably the most atypical place
on the planet. So that was part of what Amy was interacting with David
[about]—what was going to happen, where are you going in, “Oh,
oh shit.”
Ross-Nazzal:
That wouldn’t have been exciting to pick something that was
an anomaly to learn more about? You wanted to learn more about the
whole planet?
Beebe:
If you didn’t know what the typical was, then it’s pretty
hard to understand the anomaly. What we had hoped to get is real isotopic
distribution as you went down. You wanted a place that was more static,
but the delays destroyed that possibility.
Ross-Nazzal:
Were you there when the Shuttle [Atlantis, STS-34] launched Galileo
[October 18, 1989]?
Beebe:
No. I was there when we launched Voyager 2 [August 20, 1977]. We launched
Voyager 2 before Voyager 1 [September 5, 1977].
Ross-Nazzal:
Would you tell us about your memories of that launch?
Beebe:
It was disappointing, because I had had the advantage of watching
Black Brants [rockets] go off out here at White Sands [Missile Range,
New Mexico]. When you got to do that, you got to stay outside when
they launched and then you had to run into the bunker before the [rocket]
stage came down. That was spectacular, you were right there.
I remember one time we were out there, and there was a storm coming
in from the north. It was really, really dark at the site, and they
had this green laser. They were ranging the storm, because if it came
within seven miles of the pad they weren’t going to launch.
But the storm turned and came through San Augustin Pass. They launched,
but it was a really cloudy night. The Brant took off and it went up,
and when it fired its second stage the cloud was so thick that only
the longest wave red light that you could see made it back down. The
whole place just lit up in this dark red color. It was just spectacular.
I got out there [Cape Canaveral, Florida] to see the Voyager launches.
You’re way off across the lake, and probably the most exciting
thing that happened was after you’ve watched the launch then
the sound hits you. It’s coming across this lake, and there’s
all sorts of small convection cells, so it hits you as a staccato,
like the thing is breaking up. You’re looking at the spacecraft
and it’s not doing anything, and the sound is just beating on
you.
The same Garry Hunt was there with his small children, and Brad Smith
was there with his long range camera. Brad is down near the soggy
shore, and he’s got his camera lined up with a telephone pole
to steady it. He’s going to get the greatest shot of the launch.
One of Garry’s little girls said, “I say, Smith’s
getting a close-up of that post.” She was delightful.
Ross-Nazzal:
I’m sure everyone was laughing. Did he share the photo that
he took with the rest of the group?
Beebe:
I don’t think I ever saw that one.
Ross-Nazzal:
Nice kickoff to a great mission.
Beebe:
Yes. Carl Sagan was there for that launch, and there was a big press
conference. Carl showed the golden record [gold phonograph with recordings
of life on Earth sent aboard the Voyager spacecraft]. There’s
an Irish company that has been working on a [documentary] movie that
they call The Farthest. It’s the entire history of the Voyager
mission. They have a picture of [Carl’s] oldest boy and his
mother on the beach during that launch.
Ross-Nazzal:
I remember reading about the photo that was taken of planet Earth
by Voyager, when Carl Sagan had suggested that. Was there any big
discussion amongst the image folks about why we should or shouldn’t
take that photo? Or was [there] pretty much agreement about that?
Beebe:
Candy Hansen is the person that could fill you in on that entirely.
They actually interview her. I was an adviser on this movie, so I’ve
seen a lot of the pieces of it. She does a good job. It’s nicely
done.
Ross-Nazzal:
I think this might be a good place for us to stop today. That gives
you a few minutes to catch your thoughts before your telecon. We appreciate
your time today.
[End
of interview]
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