By Andrew Fabian Sunspots on Drawings That Had Regularly About Seven, Having Read in a Children’S Been Made a Few Decades Earlier

I was hooked on astronomy by the age of by Andrew Fabian sunspots on drawings that had regularly about seven, having read in a children’s been made a few decades earlier. It was encyclopedia that astronomers could far from exciting but did not dissuade me work out the composition of a star from astronomy drew me in and I resolved to from wanting to find out more about the the light it emits. That seemed wonderful. I take study physics. At 17 I spent a couple Universe. recall seeing Comet Arend-Roland when I of weeks at the Jeremiah Horrocks was nine and I followed the emerging Observatory in Preston, Lancashire, to I studied physics for my first degree at Space Progammes and spent time gain some experience. Much of my time King’s College, London. Having lived in a studying the night sky with a one-inch was taken up by measuring and counting village until then, I felt ready for a city and refractor from our back garden. Asthma meant that I missed junior school several days a month but, provided I sat still, I could read which was the main way my horizons expanded. We had no television till I was about nine. My parents were shopkeepers and not interested in science but left me to experiment, learn the constellations and read by myself. After the village junior school, I went to the state grammar school in nearby Daventry where I enjoyed most lessons but especially physics and chemistry. My asthma soon disappeared. At home in the evenings I did electronics with crystal sets, thermionic valves and then transistors, which were just becoming affordable. At 15, I ground and silvered a six-inch mirror and assembled a simple Newtonian telescope. The Moon at 200 times magnification was magnificent. Space and Me at the Jeremiah Horrocks Observatory in Preston, Lancashire, aged 17 London seemed right. It was an exciting some months it came together, and by named Uhuru which had several place at times in the late 1960s, although autumn I was testing the assembled proportional counters back in December for a penniless student keen on studying equipment on a Skylark payload module. 1970. By my launch they had buckets of science, opportunities were limited. data. Fortunately for me they were making Astronomy did not feature in my lecture Weeks were spent trying to suppress new discoveries every week (X-ray course, although I do clearly remember radio frequency interference. A binaries, X-rays from supernova remnants, Professor Herman Bondi giving a lecture transmitter was only a few metres away clusters of galaxies and so on) and didn’t on “Why is the Sky Dark at Night?” No from the very sensitive preamplifier which get around to the X-ray background. As visual aids, no black board, just clear detected minute electrical signals from luck had it, I was generously given and speaking – taking something which sounds the detector. All sharing the same published the Uhuru background data too obvious to discuss and extracting powerlines. Sometimes I would think it after a visit to them in 1975. profound cosmological consequences! was working well, then step back and everything would go haywire. Eventually it The rocket results showed that the For my PhD I considered several options, was suppressed and the instrument background was very smooth, requiring including radio astronomy at Cambridge became robust. At the same time I was more than two million sources over the led by Martin Ryle and space astronomy at learning about X-ray astronomy and whole sky, and was to be confirmed and University College London with Robert astronomy in general. At the time it was extended with a second rocket flight, this Boyd. I chose the latter and started my reckoned that the total exposure to the time from the European Space Research research in the autumn of 1969 at the X-ray sky by rocket-borne detectors was Organisation (later becoming ESA). Mullard Space Science Laboratories in the just a few hours, meaning that I could Preparation for that meant many trips to Surrey Hills between Guildford and easily read and digest every paper written the European Space Research and Dorking. By December, I had changed on the subject in my spare time. Technology Centre in Noordwijk in the supervisors several times and my new Netherlands, and the launch successfully supervisor, Pete Sanford, suggested I write Skylark SL1001 was launched from took place from Sardinia, Italy, in June a proposal for a Skylark sounding rocket Woomera in Australia in late January 1971. 1972. In the meantime, I had studied the to observe the granularity of the X-ray I spent six weeks in Australia having flown problem of fluctuations in a background Background. He had been at a conference there on a three-day, Ministry of Defence, of point sources and found that it that summer where Martin Rees had turbojet flight to Adelaide followed by train overlapped with observations of radio discussed the origin of this background to Woomera out in the desert. (The name sources in what was known as P(D) – the radiation in terms of seven radio galaxies Woomera is the indigenous name for a probability distribution of deflections in per square degree. If true, then the throwing stick.) The flight gave about 15 the pen recorder as a radio telescope granularity should be measurable. I minutes of exposure to cosmic X-rays scanned the sky. Through Martin Rees, I travelled to Cambridge to meet Martin during the upper part of its trajectory. was introduced to Peter Scheuer of the and was deeply impressed by his Fortunately the data were telemetred Cambridge Radio Astronomy Group who friendliness and the generosity with his down during the flight as the parachutes had studied the problem 15 years earlier, time to someone who was just starting became tangled and the payload smashed and also Dennis Sciama, then at Oxford, out. I also consulted David Lindley of the to pieces on hitting the ground. I spent who had a student looking at it. Both were UCL statistics department about how to the next day in a helicopter making the interested, friendly and helpful. obtain limits and was told to read his recovery, which was exciting at first but, as books. A proposal was submitted before it was extremely hot outside and the A couple of years later I worked on the Christmas and accepted in January. Things desert was dotted with salt pans, there origin of the X-ray Background with could happen rapidly. were strong convection currents: we went cosmologist Michael Rowan-Robinson and up and down like a lift, and I spent the last later in the 1980s, Xavier Barcons, with The proportional counter detector was hours feeling nauseous. whom I wrote a review on the topic in the workhorse of X-ray astronomy back 1992. In a way we were finding why the then. The X-ray Background was going to I obtained the telemetry tapes some X-ray Sky is dark at night. Riccardo be readily detectable, but what I needed weeks after my return and read them Giacconi and others finally resolved most to do was reduce the non-cosmic onto an IBM mainframe in London, of the X-ray Background into distant active background in the detector that was due analyzing them at the space laboratory. galactic nuclei with the Chandra to cosmic rays. Pete Sanford had devised The results became my first publication, Observatory in the early 2000s. a pulse-shape discrimination method for “Rocket Observations of the Cosmic X-ray doing that (X-rays produce a compact Background” by Fabian & Sanford, Nature My PhD viva was in July 1972 and rather cloud of electrons in the detector whereas Physical Sciences, May 1971. Publication rushed as I thought I was about to head cosmic rays leave an extended cloud). My could happen fast back then. I felt that I off to Cambridge Massachusetts to work immediate task was to design the was in competition with the X-ray at American Science and Engineering with electronics, using integrated circuits which astronomy group of Riccardo Giacconi at Giacconi’s group. The problem was the had not been used for that purpose American Science and Engineering in the visa. They were then hard to get, and I before at the Mullard Space Science US. (Riccardo started cosmic X-ray waited and waited until February 1973 Laboratories. I gave myself a crash course astronomy with a US rocket flight in 1962.) and learned that the job no longer existed in electronics which was far removed from The American Science and Engineering as the High Energy Astronomy my home lab work years before. After group had launched a satellite from Kenya Observatory project I was to be funded on was cancelled by NASA. It was reinstated a few years later, but I was no longer going to the US. I was lucky to remain at Mullard Space Science Laboratories as a postdoc and began working on the small X-ray detectors just launched on the Copernicus satellite. Pete Sanford was the Project Scientist for the instrument and indeed had spent most of his time in the US over the previous two years. I was probably the only person working full time on the X-ray data for the first six months or so. The satellite carried a UV observatory taking spectra of bright O stars. We could choose the pointing direction for about 10 percent of the time. We looked at X-ray binaries, supernova remnants, clusters of galaxies and active galaxies, which led to The AXAF Science Working Group where I am second from left.

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