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The Washburn Observer The Washburn DEPARTMENT OF Observer ASTRONOMY UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON Volume 8 • Fall 2018 • www.astro.wisc.edu Inside this Issue: How Wisconsin Changed Space Astronomy 50th Anniversary of OAO-2 .......1 -minus 10 minutes and counting...” All Letter from the Chair .................2 eyes are on the Atlas SLV-3C Centaur-D “Trocket, gleaming in the flood lights of Cape Ali Bramson ...............................3 Canaveral, ready to launch into the night sky. It Department News .....................4 is December 7th, 1968 and the world is gripped by space fever. In exactly two weeks, Frank Bor- The High Fiber Diet ....................5 man will take his crew around the moon on the historic Apollo 8 mission. But tonight’s launch Multi Messenger Astronomy......6 will make a different kind of history: Atop Innovations in Research this Atlas rocket sits the first successful space and Teaching ...........................7 observatory in the modern sense, the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2 (OAO-2). This story begins almost two decades earlier, with a young Art Code walking through the doors of Washburn Observatory as a newly- minted UW professor. Having served as an Elec- OAO-2 Launch on December 7, 1968 (image: NASA) tronics Technician in the Navy during World War II, Art was brimming with ideas. He was their quantum-mechanical ground state, at the soon joined by another young Wisconsin astron- bottom of a tall energy ladder that its electrons omer, Bob Bless, and together, they set out to can climb up or down. And the first step on that use the technological revolution sparked by the ladder is the tallest. To climb it, the atom must war to transcend the earth-bound limitations swallow (absorb) a UV photon. Jumping back that confined astronomy to a tiny sliver of the down will make the atom regurgitate (emit) electromagnetic spectrum. The atmosphere, for a UV photon. To study much of the gas in the all its nurturing qualities, is a nuisance to most universe, then, requires observations in the UV astronomers: It blocks light across a wide range band and a telescope above the atmosphere. of frequencies and blurs our images. To observe The first rockets were able to send payloads in the ultra-violet light, to see clearly, your tele- above the atmosphere for a few tantalizing scope must be in space, above the atmosphere. minutes at a time. Art and Bob created the The Washburn Observer The UV, Art and Bob knew, held the key to scrappy Space Astronomy Lab (SAL) to respond is the newsletter of the a huge wealth of astronomical insight. That to the new opportunities. They wanted to build Department of Astronomy is because most atoms in the universe are in a telescope that stayed above the atmosphere at the University of not for minutes but for years. It would take them Wisconsin-Madison almost two decades to reach this goal. With its launch on that fateful December night in 1968, OAO-2 became the first space observatory in the 475 N. Charter St. Madison, WI 53703-1507 modern sense, the true predecessor to Hubble. At the heart of OAO-2 sat the Wisconsin Email: Experiment Package. It shared the spacecraft [email protected] with the Harvard-built Celescope. Both were ob- Website: serving the sky in the UV. But while Celescope www.astro.wisc.edu was turned off in April 1970, the WEP kept observing through 1973. The extended mission Department Chair: Professor Sebastian Heinz of OAO-2 and the WEP made it possible to in- volve astronomers beyond Wisconsin’s primary Editors: Sebastian Heinz, instrument team, a very unusual approach in Kalli Anderson those days, so that guest observers could pro- Design: UW Astronomy Artist rendition of OAO-2 in orbit (image: UW-Madison) Continued on Page 2 The Washburn Observer Letter from the Chair eing depart- cutting edge of astronomy. Here are a with student Peter Susalla as part of the ment chair au- few examples: 2009/2010 Wisconsin State Blue Book. Btomatically makes Joel Stebbins invented photo-electric As chair, I want to continue my ex- me the Directory of photometry, turning measurements of ploration of Wisconsin history, and that Washburn Observa- star light into precision science. The includes learning from all of our alumni tory. For a theorist, structure of the galaxy was first mapped about their connections to the depart- this is a somewhat out by William W. Morgan from Yerkes ment and what they have done with their daunting respon- Observatory in Williams Bay, WI, and Al- degree, like Dr. Ali Bramson, who is pro- sibility, since I bert Whitford and Art Code at UW Mad- filed on the page across. Like last year, wouldn’t trust my- ison. The nature of interstellar dust and we will host our annual Astro Badger self with a $10,000 amateur telescope, let extinction were characterized by John alumni reception at the 2019 Winter AAS alone a 137-year old historical landmark. Mathis, Bill Rumpl, and Ken Nordsieck meeting in Seattle. All department alum- Thankfully, we have the multi-talented here at UW Madison in 1977. ni are invited! We hope to see you there. Jim Lattis on staff who actually oversees And then there’s what may be the And as always, if you are in Madison, operations at Washburn. crowning moment in our history: The please let us know and stop by for a visit. Having the chair’s office on the same topic of the cover story of this newsletter, On behalf of all Badger Astronomers, floor as Jim’s has been a real treat, the launch of the Orbiting Astronomical I wish you a peaceful and reflective holi- because Jim, Director of UW Space Place, Observatory-2 (OAO-2) in 1968, the first day season and a successful new year. is not just great with telescopes, he is true space observatory. OAO-2 demon- Sebastian Heinz, Department Chair also our staff Ph.D. historian of science. I strates Badger ingenuity at its finest. I know of no other astronomy department hope you enjoyed reading how Wiscon- that has their own historian, but I highly sin changed space science and urge you recommend it. Every hallway conver- to celebrate with us at UW Space Place Amount What could it support? sation with Jim invariably turns into a on December 7th and by following the fascinating conversation about the proud coverage on our web site. Sponsor field trip for one history of UW-Madison Astronomy. If you haven’t had a chance to experi- $20 undergrad to Fermi Lab Starting with Washburn Observatory ence Jim Lattis’ expertise in the history of itself (in 1881 the third-largest telescope all things Wisconsin Astronomy, a good Print a conference poster for $50 in the US), Wisconsin has been at the place to start is the retrospective he wrote an undergrad student Lunch for visiting class of $100 50th Anniversary of OAO-2 Continued from page 1 high school students Provide travel costs for one pose and carry out observations not planned by the $500 designers. Art and Bob would carry their experienc- colloquium speaker es with WEP’s observing programs into their work Print one issue of the $800 on the Hubble Space Telescope and the founding Washburn Observer of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which Art guided in its earliest stages. Sponsor an undergrad to $1,000 This open skies approach lives on in most NASA attend a scientific conference astronomy missions today and is arguably what has Support for our graduate made NASA telescopes like Hubble and Chandra the $3,000 successes they are: Using the collective insight and student family leave policy inspiration of world’s astronomers to devise the Sponsor long-term visitor to $5,000 best possible science program. With OAO-2, NASA department began learning how to autonomously operate and optimize a space observatory. Re-build 16 inch Sterling Hall $25,000 Over the course of its four years in orbit, OAO-2 Roof Telescope more than lived up to its promise of transform- High-Fiber Diet: An Integral ing astronomy, from discovering that comets are Left to right: Art Code, Ted Houck, John $50,000 McNall, and Bob Bless Field Spectrograph for SALT surrounded by huge hydrogen envelopes, to tracing the UV intensity of exploding stars. OAO-2 also launched Wisconsin on a trajectory Provide department share of $80,000 of innovative space instrumentation, leading to SAL delivering one of the four launch start-up cost for new faculty instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope, flying telescopes on the Space Shuttle, and Endow a named graduate our sounding rocket program, to name a few. It also made Wisconsin the scientific center $1,000,000 student fellowship for studies of interstellar gas it remains today. We are celebrating the 50th launch anniversary of OAO-2 with an evening of presen- Endow a named $3,000,000 tations, demonstrations, and refreshments at UW Space Place on December 7th, 2018. professorship Please join us in honoring the legacy of OAO-2 and the people who made it happen. 2 Badgers in Far Flung Places: Ali Bramson on a Journey to Mars An interview by UW Freshman Kalli Anderson Observatory, which is where I ended up doing a [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] pro- hat can you do with a UW degree in gram in planetary radar. I started shooting radar astronomy? “I find ice on Mars and lava beams at asteroids!” Superhero-kind of stuff. Wflows on the Moon” Astro Badger and plane- The following summer she went to the tary scientist Ali Bramson exclaimed when I SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) interviewed her about her current research.
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