A conversation with William Reach, Deputy Director at the SOFIA Science Center at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
Transcript
Host (Matthew Buffington):You are listening to NASA in Silicon Valley, episode 49. This week, we are chatting with William Reach, the Deputy Director at the SOFIA Science Center at NASA Ames. If you are new to the podcast, SOFIA is a fancy acronym that stands for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. But it literally is a flying telescope in a modified Boeing 747. SOFIA and its team are back in Christchurch, New Zealand to observe the skies over the Southern Hemisphere for seven weeks. Researchers are studying objects that aren’t visible from the Northern Hemisphere and are taking advantage of the long winter nights. Targets of interest include a supernova, as well as star formation in two nearby galaxies. SOFIA will also chase the shadow of a Kuiper Belt Object called MU 69, which is the New Horizons spacecraft’s next flyby target. If you remember, New Horizons is famous for its flyby of Pluto back in 2015. SOFIA will observe MU 69 as it passes in front of a background star, to better understand its structure, and more. To talk all about that and more, here is William Reach.
[Music]
Host: We always start it off the same way, is we want to know what brought you to NASA, how did you end up in Silicon Valley? Tell us about yourself, Bill.
William Reach: So, I’ve been working in astronomy because I wanted to do it since I was a kid.
Host: Uh-huh.
William Reach: Little kid, like five, four years old actually is what my parents tell me.
Host: Nice.
William Reach:Working on NASA missions because that’s where the exciting science was happening.
Host:Yeah.
William Reach: And it just, when I was going to college already, I was meeting people who were working in space science, working actually on the predecessor of SOFIA, which we’ll talk about, I guess. And developing instruments for it.
Host: Cool.
William Reach: One thing led to another.
Host: So before you get too much into SOFIA, because we fortunately on the podcast, you know, being here and having the science part of SOFIA run out NASA Ames, we’ve been fortunate to get a lot of people talking about the flying telescope. But, so are you originally from this area, are you from California or – ?
William Reach: No, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.
Host: Oh nice.
William Reach: Yeah. Yeah, my father was a West Point Army guy, so I moved around a lot when I was younger. But most of my childhood was in Atlanta, Georgia.
Host: Oh cool.
William Reach: So, evolving out from that and into academic world was a first for the people that I was hanging out with.
Host: But you were always super into looking up at the stars. I guess no matter where you moved.
William Reach: I just always was. It’s not clear, but it’s wired into my brain somehow.
Host: Oh excellent, so did you go to school out here? Or how did that work out?
William Reach: So from Atlanta I went up to Cornell University in New York and did my undergraduate there and got a bachelor’s degree in physics.
Host: Nice.
William Reach: It was a great school and of course the reason I went there was so that I could be in the place where Carl Sagan was.
Host: Of course.
William Reach: The time when I was looking for a school to go to was when the “Cosmos” series was first coming out.
Host: Yeah.
William Reach: I was already interested in astronomy even before then, but seeing Carl Sagan was just a tremendous enticement to continue in the field. And going out there, trying to be close to him was part of my reason.
Host: That’s awesome.
Host: Did you end up going, were you looking at academia after that point, or was it like, “I’m going straight to NASA.” Or how does that transition work from school, loving space, into landing a job?
William Reach: Yeah, there was a time early on when I thought being an astronaut would be cool.
Host: It happens to most.
William Reach: Apparently a lot of people do.
Host: A lot of people do.
William Reach: We notice, I forgot the number of applicants for that program.
Host: I know it was like 30,000 something – and it may be wrong, but lots we can say.
William Reach: Yes. And the selection rate is very hard. And I realized that I’m actually probably a better service to humanity and better suited to me is the more purely academic. So I was pretty good at it, I felt in my home there, because the astronauts were a little more athletic and physical and often having a military background, which – while interesting – wasn’t exactly my forte.
So yeah, the translation went from being in college, interested in space, finding an undergraduate internship with someone in the astronomy department. That was probably where it was decided in some sense, or fated, that I’d end up working on NASA stuff, even though it was at a university setting, because they were doing the instrument development for Kuiper Airborne Observatory.
Host: And for “Kuiper,” explain that a little bit.
William Reach: So that was an airborne telescope. And the principal investigators could develop infrared instruments, measure new spectral lines, measure the brightness at wavelengths that hadn’t been done before, couldn’t be done from the ground.
Host: Nice.
William Reach: And it was actually in the days when computers were pretty crude. So, I was brought in as a young guy, didn’t know anything about – I did a little bit of soldering in the lab – but electronics is actually still mysterious to me.
Host: Nice.
William Reach: But the computer stuff –
Host: The cosmos, you’re good. You got this. You can tell us all about the heavenly bodies.
William Reach: The cosmoses are good. Yeah, that’s right.
Host:…soldering a motherboard.
William Reach: So could they. No, no, I still can’t do soldering. Electronics is a mystery.
Host: Nice.
William Reach: But I could do the computer stuff that the older people in the group didn’t know how to do. Like we couldn’t communicate from one part of the lab to the other. So we’d work on the computer on our department computer and then want to get it on the instrument – excuse me – on the computer that actually controls the instrument.
So that would be this little [view] board, not even a personal computer, but it is a very small computer and then you couldn’t do that. So we actually had to do it via telephone just from one part of the lab to the other.
Host: Oh wow.
William Reach: Just hook them both up to modems and have them talk to each other. So I was just doing that. And because it was interesting and I realized that getting out of the atmosphere and going into space was the way to study a part of the universe that had been very little explored, that was what drove me to NASA.
Host: And so when you joined NASA I am guessing, was it straight working on SOFIA?
William Reach: No. No, no, no. I went to grad school, [University of California] Berkeley, so I moved to the Bay Area. And I lived here six years then when I was going grad school. And that was on space infrared data, archival. I wasn’t working on the missions, but we were using the data. I was working on IRAS, the first infrared all-sky survey.
Host: Nice, you did that off the top of your head.
William Reach: Infrared Astronomical Satellite.
Host: Oh, nice, okay.
William Reach: You can do backronyms any different way. So anyway, yeah, I was working on IRAS, and the data from that were so good in that you could see so many things, including background radiation or background light, and study it in ways that were not possible before.
Host: So when you pivoted over to NASA, you’re starting to work on SOFIA. I get a kick out of it because you always hear about the space telescopes – Kepler, Hubble, and then there’s also the land-based ones – and I get a kick out of SOFIA because it is an airborne telescope.
So for folks listening, give them the SOFIA 101. What exactly is SOFIA? People are listening for the first time.
William Reach: So the most basic thing is we put telescopes as high as we can. We put telescopes on mountain tops to get above the low Earth’s atmosphere. We put them in space – space is the place. That’s where I’d rather be working.
Host: Ideally.
William Reach: I don’t want to be working on SOFIA; I want to be working in space.
Host: Yeah, it’s expensive.
William Reach: But space is far, expensive, hard and challenging, and the cycle of technology is slow. So we try – there’s this intermediate ground. We’re very much higher than the mountain tops, otherwise we would crash into them.
Host: Yes, obviously.
William Reach: So we’re at about 41,000 feet, just a little higher than a normal 747 goes on its passenger flights. But we’re very much less than space. So it’s in that middle ground. So there’s a lot of windows where just that bit was three times higher than mountains, just that bit does it. And even a 14,000-foot mountain is a lot better than a 10,000-foot mountain. So it really does help.
Host: It’s an interesting aspect to it because you think of Hubble as one of those rare few examples where you have a space telescope that could be repaired and fixed after the fact. Most of the time, you send it up into space and you are stuck with whatever hardware you designed for it. Years before when it was formulated and launched and built. But the cool thing about SOFIA, I mean, it’s on an airplane, so your instrumentation – you know, you go up, you land, and you can update and switch out instruments.
William Reach: Yeah, that’s right, and we have calls for instruments every few years. So our third-generation instrument is being developed now. And that’s on the U.S. side. And then on the German side – I didn’t even mention it is a German-U.S. partnership.
Host: Okay.
William Reach: On the German side, they’ve been upgrading their instruments too. So we have third-generation both U.S. and German instruments being developed and, yes, it’s pushing the cutting edge.
The German instrument, for example, has upgraded from being a single pixel, a single beam, to now being an array. And at each pixel, at each of the horns of their array, is much more sensitive than the original. And that’s just in a few years. And, actually every year they have something a little different. So they went from one to now 14 pixels and then now they have an array at a new wavelength that they just tried actually.
Host: How long?
William Reach: A week before last was the “first light” flight for that combination of insurance. So we can do seven beams of one spectral line and 14 of another. A little technical, but the point is that it’s pushing the cutting edge, as you were saying. And we can change it. And year by year there are significant changes.
Host: And looking into the next, coming up right now – we do record this in the past, so this is in the future – but you guys are getting ready to head off to New Zealand.
William Reach: That’s right.
Host: And as I understand you guys were even in New Zealand last summer, as well, right, or around the same time?
William Reach: Yes, we’ve done four – well, this will be our fourth New Zealand deployment. We go in the summer of our hemisphere; I guess it’s the winter of the Southern Hemisphere.
Host: It’s winter for them.
William Reach: Yeah, the cold season, whatever you call it. We go there for many reasons. So that includes the fact that the nights are longer. That’s an obvious one. We need darkness in order to see the sky and the guide stars that we use to control the telescope.
We also benefit a lot from cold weather, because the ice is frozen, the water is frozen. Water is the thing that we’re trying to get above.
Host: Yeah, above the water vapor.
William Reach: It also helps to be at more extreme latitudes, because the Earth’s atmosphere is thinner as you go towards the pole. It is just because the rotation of the Earth spins and makes it – pushes the gas out by centrifugal force, just speaking quickly. And that makes the atmosphere thicker in the tropics. It’s also thicker, hotter. Atmospherically it’s way bad to be in the tropics, but it’s nicer to be out towards the poles. So that is nice.
And then, the number one reason, saved for last, is that you can see the southern sky, which you can’t see from here. And even the parts of the southern sky that we can see, like the constellation Sagittarius. You can see it. I can see it from my driveway. But it’s pretty low. And when it’s that low, it’s not up very long and you’re looking through a lot of the Earth’s atmosphere to get to it. But from New Zealand it goes almost overhead. It goes very high and we can observe it for hours at high altitudes.
Host: And since you guys are going back, is this like a follow-up deployment or are you guys just –
William Reach: Why do we go over and over?
Host: Yeah.
William Reach: Yeah. We have more to do.
Host: You can learn from what you did last time, I am sure.
William Reach: Well, and because there’s new developments. So this time, one of our focus points is going to be mapping using this new German instrument, the 14-pixel array. We’re going to be mapping the galactic center. That’s one of our things.
Host: Okay.
William Reach: So before we have observed it, we’ve made some nice spectra, we’ve made some limited amount of reconnaissance, but now we can actually do larger scale mapping, so a strip that goes through – I mean, it will take forever to map the whole place, so there’s always more real estate to do.
But even for the most important part, well most important in some people’s minds –
Host: Well, yes.
William Reach: But the interesting part is very close to the central black hole in the middle of the Milky Way, we can map the whole thing in these important spectral lines.
Host:So looking at – going to New Zealand on this deployment, do you normally take like multiple instruments or are you primarily focusing on this new German update, or how does that work? Do you switch them out? How does that happen?
William Reach: So we have brought the German instrument every time. So we also have a mid-infrared camera that we take. We have a far-infrared integral field spectrograph that we take. And then we have an optical camera and a near-infrared camera. So we’ve taken quite a few instruments down there.
This year we’re taking three. We’re taking two far-infrared instruments and the mid-infrared camera. One of them stays on the telescope as we fly it. They’re going to take off on June 21st. They’ll fly to Hawaii, and then refuel, and then continue down to Christchurch [New Zealand] with one instrument on the telescope and one down in the underbelly and packed up.
And all the equipment is already en route. Some of it has already arrived. Like the computer people are already there setting up. And we have some equipment in fact pre-staged. Like there’s four [clifts]. We even have spare engine that Air New Zealand maintains for us down there.
Host: Oh wow.
William Reach: So the reason to bring all these different instruments down there is because we want to do very different things. Besides mapping galactic center and similarly mapping the nearby galaxies that are satellites to our own, the Magellinic clouds, we also have unique time-sensitive opportunities.
So last year, we observed an occultation of Pluto.
Host: And by occultation –?
William Reach: So that’s when Pluto went in front of a star.
Host: Nice, so it’s like an eclipse or, you know —
William Reach: And cast a shadow. And we flew through the shadow. And then this year we have a very high-stakes or high-benefit occultation that we are going to observe. There’s the NASA New Horizons spacecraft is en route to a target after its highly successful encounter with Pluto. It’s continued on and it is going to explore this new object, which we know as MU69, after its full name of 2014 MU69.
The New Horizons spacecraft is en route to this object now, about which we know very little. It’s small. They intentionally chose something that is very different from anything else we’ve ever tried.
Host: Okay.
William Reach: So, because we know so little about it, the fact that it can be observed by any method from the ground is of great benefit.
Host: Yeah.
William Reach: And SOFIA is going to observe it just using the guide camera actually. We’re not even going to bring one of our wonderful high-sensitivity infrared instruments. We’re going to use the guide camera to stare at the star that this object MU69 is going to pass in front of, and just watch it get fainter and come back again.
And we’ll be looking for any stuff that is near that object. If it had rings, or if it had a cloud of debris around it, then we would see that before the shadow went completely dark – because the object’s in front of the star – we’d see some blips. So some decreases in brightness. So if we see those, if we see evidence of material near that object, then that is a significant hazard to the New Horizon spacecraft.
So the flight team really wants to know and scientifically we’re very interested in – the same reason that they are going there – because we don’t know much about it.
Host: Well, I was going to say this also isn’t also the first time that it’s kind of been the SOFIA/New Horizons tag team. I think even before New Horizons got to Pluto. We had Kim Ennico came over and was talking about how she was at that time working on New Horizons that SOFIA was able to look at Pluto in advance of right before New Horizons arrives. So it’s like this tag team of instrumentation just helps to better understand things.
William Reach: It certainly does. And it’s nice to be able to use one NASA asset to help another. And the study of these outer solar system objects is really multi-telescope, multi-wavelength, multi-method. So that it goes all the way from combining cameras that have to be designed to work very fast during a fly-by, to the largest ground-based telescopes. So in addition to SOFIA’s observation of the occultation, which we did for Pluto and will do for this MU69 object, Hubble Space Telescope is very much involved in this.
Host: How awesome.
William Reach: Yeah, we have many, many orbits of Hubble Space Telescope going into helping to characterize exactly where it is. We want to find out whether it is binary. And then to assist with the occultation observations, they’re doing observations of the stars that the object is going in front of to find out if those stars are binary and exactly where they are.
So we’ve been using – well we have current and ongoing observations with Hubble – up until the week before – and then the investigators will have flown down to New Zealand and they’re going to be down there in-country reducing the latest data to figure out exactly where this object is going to be and where we fly to get into the shadow.
Host: So when you head on down to New Zealand, you’re working on this – I’m guessing it’s for a period of a couple of weeks, a couple of months – what does your day-to-day look like? You wake up, drink your coffee, and then head up on the plane and spend a couple of hours in there, and how does that work?
William Reach: Well, we observe at night, so –
Host: Okay, yeah, so you drink your coffee at like 8 p.m.
William Reach: So there’s many different kinds of crew working on this.
Host: Okay.
William Reach: We have the flight crew. The flight crew, they wake up in the early afternoon, and then they check their emails and drink their coffee – you’ve got to have that. And then they go to the crew briefing, get on board the plane, do their business, and then they come down. The flights are 10 hours.
Host: Oh wow.
William Reach: So, and we need them to be in tip-top shape in order to do subsequent flights, so we restrict their duty days not to be too long. That’s why they pretty much wake up, do the briefing and get on the plane.
Host: Yeah, really.
William Reach: So that is the flying crew. There’s ground crew. They’re people who swap the instruments out, who receive the airplane, refuel, can replace engines, can do that kind of work. They work pretty much a regular schedule. They receive the plane, they have to be there to receive the plane.
Host: In the morning.
William Reach: And then they have shifts. And the there’ll be some science crew that doesn’t fly. So for example, I’ll be down there and I’ll be on the MU69 flight and one or two others, but not a lot. I will be there doing tours and science support. So when the night crew lands, and they say, “So and so and so and so didn’t work; the observations of these two targets didn’t work, and we don’t think we should do any more of those,” then someone has to figure out what else should we do instead? So in that sense there’s three different kinds of work day.
Host: So looking into this, this deployment, returning, what are you looking forward to the most? Or what is the most interesting, what are you hoping to learn that’s different from what you didn’t know this time that you’re excited to learn about or discover, I suppose?
William Reach: It’s always hard to pick one thing.
Host: Nice.
William Reach: Because I’m engaged with a lot of the observers. I know that they have high hopes that their project is going to do well. I look very much forward to seeing these new images of the galactic center. I am very nervous and excited about getting the occultation to work out because it is coordinated among really so many people and so many different walks of life to make that happen.
I’m interested in the observations of the galactic center that will actually be made with two instruments, not just the terahertz spectrograph but also the integral field spectrograph.
So, it’s all interesting to me. The reason I came to work in infrared astronomy and that I’m at a leadership level and that I know the field well, and so it’s easy to get your heart set on many different things at once. So I don’t really have a single –
Host: Yeah, I’m sure there’s the things that you are hoping to discover, but I am sure there’s a lot of surprises that happen along the way.
William Reach: Yes.
Host: You know, the things that you end up finding out. But I also imagine you are collecting data from these observations but it’s, I’m sure, months, years, after the fact people are still sifting through stuff and papers get written after the fact by combining other information together, so.
William Reach:Yeah, usually you have a decent idea if it was something bright and if it was something weird, then you can know that on the plane. But for most experiments, they’re pretty hard. If they weren’t hard we would not be doing them.
Host: Yeah, exactly.
William Reach: It would have already been done, or you could do it from the ground, so we intentionally do things that are pretty hard. Oh, and if the object is really so bright and you observe it 10 times longer than you need, then you can make a beautiful image, but we don’t actually just make beautiful images. We actually want to detect new things. So everyone has tuned their experiments to just pretty much barely get what they need. And so, they can look for discoveries but they do generally need some time. And so, the typical time to go from an observation back to publication is about two years, actually.
Host: Oh wow.
William Reach: Yeah.
Host: So for folks who are interested in learning more about SOFIA and following Bill’s adventures in New Zealand, we are @NASAAmes on Twitter, but we’re also @SOFIATelescope as well. In fact, anybody who listens to the podcast, from time to time you’ll hear some of the stories about SOFIA read by our very own Kassandra – she’ll be there with Bill following everything – and has a lot of adventure and things planned, whether it’s a Facebook Live, Snapchat, all that interesting stuff. We are using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. So if anybody has any questions for Bill, we’ll hook you guys up so he can get those back to you.
But thanks for coming. This has been way fun.
William Reach: Oh, my pleasure.
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