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By NASA
Titans Space Industries, a commercial space company, selected a new cohort of astronaut candidates this spring – and among them is NASA citizen scientist, Benedetta Facini. She has participated in not one, but many NASA citizen science projects: Cloudspotting on Mars, Active Asteroids, Daily Minor Planet, GLOBE, Exoasteroids and International Astronomical Collaboration (IASC). We asked her a few questions about her work with NASA and her path to becoming an astronaut candidate.
Benedetta Facini visiting Kennedy Space Center in 2023 Credit: B.F. Q: How did you learn about NASA Citizen Science?
A: Through colleagues and social media, I often came across people talking about Citizen Science, and this immediately caught my curiosity. I did some online research on the subject, and I asked some colleagues already involved in it. Finally, I managed to find the way to participate by exploring the programs offered by NASA Citizen Science, which impressed me with their variety.
Q: What would you say you have gained from working on these NASA projects?
A: Curiosity in discovering new things and a lot of patience: many projects indeed require attention and, as mentioned, patience. I was pleased to discover that even NASA relies on “ordinary people” to carry out research, giving them the opportunity to learn new things using simple tools.
I also gained hands-on experience in analyzing real data and identifying celestial objects to contribute to real research efforts. My favorite part was to learn to recognize the pattern of clouds in data collected by the Mars Climate Sounder on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
I have learned the importance of international collaboration: I know many citizen scientists now, and interacting with them teaches me a lot every day.
Q. What do you do when you’re not working on citizen science?
A: I am a student and a science communicator. I share my knowledge and enthusiasm through social media, schools, webinars around the world, and space festivals across Italy where I have the opportunity to engage with a wide audience, from young students to adults.
Recently, I achieved a major milestone: I was selected as an Astronaut Candidate by the commercial space company, Titans Space Industries. I am thrilled to soon begin the basic training, which marks the first step toward realizing my dream of becoming an astronaut and contributing directly to human spaceflight and scientific research.
Q. What do you need to do to become an astronaut?
A: Gain as much experience as possible. During astronaut selection, not only academic achievements are evaluated, but also professional and personal experiences.
Every skill can be useful during the selection process: the ability to work in a team, which is essential during space missions; survival skills; experience as a diver, skydiver, or pilot; knowledge of other languages; and the ability to adapt to different situations.
I would also like to debunk a myth: you don’t need to be Einstein and fit as an Olympic level athlete; you just need to be good at what you do and be healthy.
Q: How has citizen science helped you with your career?
A: Citizen Science was very helpful for my career as a science communicator, as it gave me the opportunity to show people that anyone can contribute to the space sector. At the same time, it has allowed me to become a mentor and a point of reference for many students (mainly with the IASC project).
The hands-on experience I gained in analyzing real data was also very helpful for my academic career, too. I had never had real data to work with before, and this experience proved extremely valuable for the practical courses in my physics degree program.
Q. Do you have any advice you’d like to share for other citizen scientists or for people who want to become astronauts?
A: For other citizen scientists my advice is to stay curious and persistent.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help and interact with other colleagues because the goal of the NASA Citizen Science program is international collaboration and every small contribution can make a difference.
For aspiring astronauts, my advice is to gain as much experience as possible. Academic results are important but hands-on skills, teamwork, adaptability, and real experiences are also important.
Stay passionate and never lose your curiosity; the astronaut path is challenging; don’t give up after an eventual first rejection. You will always meet people trying to make you change your mind and your dream, even people from your family, but don’t stop in front of obstacles. The greatest regret is knowing you didn’t try to make your dream come true.
Quoting my inspiration, Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli: “You need to have the ability and the courage to dream of impossible things. Everyone can dream of things that are possible. Dream of something impossible, one of those things that, when you say it out loud, people look at you and say: “Sure, study hard and you’ll make it,” but deep down no one really believes it. Those are the impossible things that are worth trying to do!”
Q: Thank you for sharing your story with us! Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: I would like to thank the team behind NASA Citizen Science.
These projects play a crucial role in keeping students’ passion for science alive and guiding them toward a potential career in this field.
Knowing that I have contributed to helping scientists is incredibly motivating and encourages me and students around the world to keep going, stay curious, and continue pursuing our path in the science field.
The opportunity to participate in these projects while learning is inspiring and it reinforces the idea that everyone, regardless of their background, can make a real impact in the scientific community.
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Last Updated Aug 25, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Portrait of Dave Des Marais Let’s start with your childhood, where you’re from, your family at the time, if you have siblings, your early years, and when it was that you became interested in what has developed into your career as an astrophysicist or research scientist?
I was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1948, the youngest of four siblings – two brothers, a sister and myself. My father was a civil engineer for DuPont chemical company and designed HVAC systems for plants built in the late 30’s and early 40’s for the war effort. Our family moved around frequently back then, so my siblings and I were born in different states. When our father transferred to DuPont headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, we moved to nearby Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles southwest of Philadelphia. During my childhood, my participation in outdoor activities with the Boy Scouts and my motivation by excellent high school chemistry and physics teachers stimulated my interest in the natural sciences.
I attended Purdue University in Indiana in part because Purdue had an excellent chemistry curriculum and because my second older brother, whom I had always admired, received his chemical engineering degree there. As an undergraduate, I was particularly fascinated by the periodic table of the elements and analytical chemistry. Experiences outside the classroom were also important. I noticed that another student in my dormitory had a little miner’s carbide headlamp on his desk. He explored caves as a member of the Purdue Outing Club and invited me to join. When we took caving and climbing trips in southern Indiana, I developed a fascination with geology, particularly about how caves form and about rocks generally. This kindled my interest in geochemistry, which ultimately guided my choices of graduate school and career. Three factors led to my decision in 1970 to attend Indiana University. One was IU’s strong geology and geochemistry programs. I also wanted to remain as near as possible to Shirley, my future spouse. The third reason was to continue exploring caves!
While at IU I indeed continued cave exploration. I joined the Cave Research Foundation (CRF), which maps caves and supports research in the national parks, particularly in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, which is the longest cave in the world, with 250 miles of mapped passageways. My involvement with CRF deepened my interest in other aspects of geology and geochemistry.
(left) Cave in the Guadalupe Mountains, NM (D. Des Marais, 1980). (right) Climbing the 510 ft.-pit in Ellisons Cave, GA (D. Des Marais, 1972) My NASA connection began when Dr. John Hayes became my graduate advisor in geochemistry. Hayes’ graduate dissertation had addressed organic compounds in meteorites. He was also involved with the Viking mission as a member of Klaus Bieman’s MIT research group, which created the mass spectrometer for the Mars Viking mission. I took Hayes’ class on mass spectrometry, and fortunately he liked my term paper! Soon after, I chose to do my dissertation with him on lunar sample analyses, focusing on carbon and other elements relevant to life. I first presented my work in 1972 at the third Lunar Science Conference, where I met Sherwood Chang, then chief of the Ames Exobiology branch. Sherwood was also investigating carbon and other elements in lunar samples. Sherwood, John, and others inspired me to continue in the space sciences.
That’s an Interesting path because many of our researchers had a postdoc with somebody or attended a conference and met someone through that network and found their way to Ames that way.
I then did a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA with Dr. Isaac (Ian) Kaplan, whose biogeochemistry group also had analzed lunar samples. I continued developing methods for carbon isotopic analyses of very small samples. The carbon-13 to carbon-12 abundance ratios of molecules can offer clues about how they are formed. Isotopic measurements also help to identify contamination in meteorites and other extraterrestrial samples. Sherwood Chang wanted to create an isotope geochemistry laboratory in the Ames Exobiology Branch, and that led to my being hired at Ames in 1976.
You mentioned contamination of the meteorites. Was it geo-contamination or contamination from elsewhere that concerned you?
The basic analytical goal is to decipher the entire history of an extraterrestrial sample, starting with understanding the contents of an object when it was formed, which in most cases was billions of years ago. When an object was still in space, other events happened that altered its composition. But our major concern has been about what happens after a meteorite arrives here. Life has become so pervasive that its chemical ‘fingerprints’ are on virtually everything. It’s difficult to avoid these substances anywhere in the shallow Earth’s crust. Also, Earth is an inhospitable place for meteorites because its surface environments are relatively hot and moist compared to conditions in space. So our environment can alter the meteorites and add organic contamination.
What has been your most interesting work here at Ames?
I have had a near-unique opportunity to explore the biogeochemistry of carbon across a wide range of processes and environments that sustain our biosphere. I investigated the isotope geochemistry of carbon and nitrogen in lunar samples, meteorites, and oceanic basalts. Our molecular isotopic measurements of hydrocarbons in carbonaceous chondrites confirmed their extraterrestrial origins and provided clues about their synthesis. My measurements of mid-oceanic basalts and hydrocarbon gases in geothermal systems chracterized components from the mantle and from sedimentary organic carbon.
Co-leading a field trip in Yellowstone National Park (2015) I participated in the Precambrian Paleobiology Research Group at U.C.L.A., led by Dr. J. W. Schopf. For example, we documented carbon isotopic evidence for the long-term evolution and oxygenation of Earth’s early environment. Later, I coordinated a long-term project to study the biogeochemistry of marine benthic microbial communities as modern analogs of Earth’s oldest known (>3 billion yr.-old) ecosystems. We characterized their enormous microbial diversity, their highly efficient harvesting of sunlight, their cycling of life-sustaining elements, and mechanisms for their fossilization in sedimentary rocks. These experiences, among others, informed me as I chaired the development of NASA’s Astrobiology Roadmaps in 2003 and 2008, and as I served as PI of Ames’ NASA Astrobiology Institute team from 1998 to 2014. These roles also informed my participation in NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover and Curiosity rover missions.
Des Marais et al. with a microbial mat experiment in Baja California (2000) Now that you’ve described what your pursuit is, what your discipline or research interests are, how would you justify that to people who are not scientists as to why taxpayers should be funding this particular research for NASA?
NASA’s research programs are uniquely positioned to explore and compare multiple planets, including Earth. All life depends critically upon interactions between organisms and the geological processes and climate of their host planet. My career has addressed these interactions in multiple ways. Studies such as these are important for understanding the future of life on Earth, and they also guide our search for evidence of life elsewhere and for planning human missions to other bodies in our solar system.
A more specific answer to your question is that the public has been interested in any life on Mars. Searching for evidence of past or present life there requires environmental surveys and analyses to identify the most promising locations. NASA’s Viking mission illustrated why most of the Martian surface is really not suitable to look for evidence of life. At least 70% of the surface of Mars is clearly unsuitable, but the remaining more promising 30% is still a lot of territory. The surface area of Mars is equal to that of all the continents on Earth. Much of my research has related to an assessment of habitability, namely, assessing the resources that an environment must provide to sustain life. Where are the best places to look? Our rovers have now visited places that we are convinced could have supported life some three or more billion years ago. The next questions are: did any fossils survive and can we actually bring the right samples back to Earth to confirm any findings?
Also, could a human mission sustain itself there? Again, we must look for resources that might support life today. Geochemical analyses are a key aspect of that search. If we have any future interest in Mars related to astrobiology or to human missions, we need to assess the past habitability and the present life-sustaining resources of potential landing sites. The public generally supports these exploration goals.
They do, that is true, and that’s really the answer to why NASA does what it does. It’s directed by Congress, and they are influenced by the public, by what the public wants. I’ve always thought, or at least for a long time, that robotic exploration is much more practical, but the country wants astronauts, that’s where the public support is.
I agree totally!
And so, we continue to do that, and they’ve done wonderful things. But the time will come when it’s not feasible to do astronautic things because we humans don’t live long enough given the distances involved.
Certainly that’s applies for destinations beyond our solar system. And even if there is a human mission to Mars, astronauts are going to be in a station, with robots going out in all directions. So robots will be with us in many ways for the future.
It’s a very fascinating career you’ve described and the work that has followed from it.
Thanks! It’s certainly been very fulfilling personally.
What advice might you give to a young person who sees what you’re doing, is intrigued by it, and would like to pursue it as a career, would like to become a researcher for NASA?
The advice I would give a young person is just engage in multiple experiences. You don’t know what what will stimulate and motivate you until you try it. And once you find something in particular, like astrobiology, then apply to institutions, like universities or institutes that are involved. Go to a place where they’re doing stuff that’s related to astrobiology in some way. Secondly, see if you can get yourself in a lab and get some undergraduate research experience.
As an example, what worked for my son? He’s not in astrobiology. He went to Berkeley as an undergraduate and wanted to be a physician. But then he had an opportunity to work in someone’s plant biology lab. By the time he was applying for graduate schools he was identifying professors with whom he might want to work. Now, years later, he’s a professor in plant genetics at a major university. When I applied to graduate schools, my approach wasn’t nearly as rigorous as my son’s strategy! So, perhaps get an undergraduate experience in a lab and, in any case, get a sense of what’s interesting by giving yourself multiple experiences and not necessarily focusing too soon. That’s the most general advice.
That is similar to what parents do with their children. They don’t know what their children are going to be interested in or would do well, so they expose them to music, to art, and to all kinds of things and with some of them there won’t be any connection, but at some point, they’ll be interested in something and want to pursue it. So, you’re right, get a broad exposure to a variety of things and something will resonate.
Yes, the more experiences, the better chance you might hit something that really resonates for you.
You’ve talked about your professional work and research interests but what do you do for fun?
Well, along with a lot of the things I’ve already described, my interest in the outdoors has always been high. Our family has done a lot of hiking and travel.
Do you still do caving or spelunking?
I was still active after joining Ames in 1976. I got CRF involved at Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, and CRF is still working there. I’ve been fortunate to participate in this collaboration between CRF and the National Park Service at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, California. My active participation tapered off about the same time my involvement with Mars picked up in the 1990’s.
Earlier, I mentioned a little miner’s carbide cap lamp in another student’s dormitory room that led me to the Outing Club, geology, and ultimately my career. So, over the years I’ve collected artifacts related to mining and interacted with folks who explore the history of mining and its economic importance. That has made me realize just how difficult were the lives of miners. What I hadn’t anticipated was how grateful I became that I am alive today and not 100+ years ago, or that I live in the US and not many other places today.
I often feel that. There are a lot of places in the world where you can’t just go over to the wall and dial up the temperature you want. We are certainly blessed in that regard. So, the collecting has been kind of a hobby for you. Do you have any musical interest or talent, anything like that?
I was pretty proficient at the piano until I got into high school. But I took up the saxophone and got into the high school band. Later, I joined the Purdue Marching Band and played at football games. That was a great experience but I didn’t continue beyond my college sophomore year. My daughter and son have continued on piano intermittently as an effective form of relaxation. This reminds me of Carl Pilcher (former NASA Senior Scientist for Astrobiology and Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute) who was a really good pianist.
I didn’t know that and that’s interesting to me because I knew Carl. This is one reason why we do these interviews, because there will be a number of people who will read this and they won’t have known that about Carl if they knew him, and that’s how these little things that we don’t know about people come out as we sit down and talk with each other. You’ve mentioned your wife, Shirley, and your son and your daughter. Would you like to say anything else about your family? Or your pets, or things you like to do together or vacations, anything like that?
Shirley and I have been married 54 years as of this interview. She was an elementary school teacher for more than 25 years. Her support was crucial while I was in graduate school. She became a full-time parent for our pre-school children but then returned to Redwood City schools for most of her teaching career. She then became deeply involved in the local chapter of the League of Women Voters, serving both as its chairman and in other leadership positions. Shirley is the keystone of our family and she has enabled my career achievements immeasurably.
Our son is a is a molecular biologist. He went to Berkeley first aspiring to be a doctor probably because his high school biology teacher emphasized human physiology. At Berkeley he ventured from one interest to the next. He had not been inspired by plant biology in high school, probably because his teachers focused on rote memorization of facts. But later he gained research experience in a Berkeley plant lab and got really interested in them. He attended graduate school at Duke University and is now an assistant professor in plant genetics with the MIT civil engineering department. Why, you ask, is a civil engineering department interested in plant genetics? MIT started a major climate change project and one key concern is how crops must adapt. His specialty is plant water use efficiency, response to CO2 levels, and temperature, factors that would be affected by a changing climate.
Des Marais family in Yellowstone National Park (2001) Our daughter also attended Berkeley. She studied international economics of developing countries. She is good at math and also interested in social issues, so that curriculum motivated her. But her ultimate career choice arose from the focus on developing countries and her experiences in South America when she spent a semester at a university in Chile, and then worked with nonprofit organizations in Brazil. She then got a master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina. She’s still involved in public health in North Carolina, working with a foundation that advises county health departments about treatments for drug addiction. The government has provided funds for counties, especially rural counties. She leads a group that’s advising them on how to administer these funds effectively.
That’s very commendable. You should be proud of her as well.
Yeah, we certainly are.
We also had cats from the early ‘70’s up until maybe 2010 or something like that. We eventually achieved ‘parental freedom’ when the kids moved away and the pets passed away. But our our family’s legacy lives on: both our son and our daughter have multiple cats in their houses! (laughs)
We had cats too, and enjoyed them. My wife used to have to go away for a week or so every month to tend her parents, who were getting elderly, because she wanted to keep them in their home. I used to think it was funny that people talked to their pets, but when she was away, I talked to the cat all the time! I really enjoyed having her around. She would curl up on my lap if I was watching TV. She was good company.
Yeah, no kidding. Dogs especially are like little kids that never grow up!
Yes!
One of the questions we like to ask is who or what has inspired you along your life path?
My high school chemistry teacher inspired me about chemistry. He was also an outdoorsman type. My older brother was involved in Boy Scouts, and that also nurtured my interest in Scouts and the outdoors.
At the time I was enrolled at Purdue University, a geology department had recently started and three faculty occupied the basement of an engineering building. Dr. Levandowski advocated that geochemistry might actually be a good match for me. At Indiana University, John Hayes, my thesis advisor, was very accomplished, charismatic, and inspirational. He was recognized internationally and ultimately inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. And, of course, Sherwood Chang and Chuck Klein helped inspire and guide my early career at Ames.
Do you read for pleasure and if so, what do you like to read? What genre do you enjoy?
I do not read fiction for pleasure. I frequently read popular science and technology articles, so I guess that’s my pleasure reading. It’s still science, but it’s science that extends well beyond my own work, and I find that interesting.
Absolutely it is. I don’t read enough for pleasure. I buy a lot of books that I intend to read, but I just never get around to them. My wife says, in jest I think, when I’m gone, she’s going to have a big bonfire and burn all of them because they take up a lot of space. I would like to live to be 200 and read all of them, but I know I won’t! (laughs)
One of the things that we like to do is add pictures to these interviews, of things we talked about, or any images that you particularly like. What picture might you have on the wall there in your office, or perhaps in your home? You could add something later after thinking about it a bit. I had a map of the world, a satellite image of the world at night, in my office for a time. You’ve probably seen it. I was fascinated by it because you could tell so much about the countries by the lighting, the different colors, where it was and where it wasn’t.
I have a big map of the world that emphasizes geology and particularly shows a lot of details about the ocean floor, especially with the volcanoes and all the features there. And you’ve probably seen the exobiology mural? it was in building N-200.
I think I know which one you’re talking about. It has sea life coming up from the ocean on one side across the land and up to the stars on the other side.
Exobiology panorama (D. Des Marais, L. Jahnke, T. Scattergood, 1988) That’s right. Linda Jahnke, Tom Scattergood, and I created that back in 1980’s.
You did?
Yeah. When the art department made copies, I got one for my office, and several others have copies also.
Oh, that’s wonderful. If you have an image of that you could include it when you send me back your edited transcript, and we could put it in and attribute it to you, Linda, and Tom.
OK. That mural touches on several research topics I’ve addressed during my career. So, it would be a good one to include.
We also ask if there is a favorite quote that has been particularly meaningful to you. We can put that in, too.
‘Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans’ (John Lennon)
‘We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.’ (the attribution to Winston Churchill is controversial)
Thank you for getting in touch with me and for sitting down for an hour to do this. I will get this into a format where you can edit it. And then we’ll make a post out of it. And I think you’ll be pleased. And if not, you’ll have only yourself to blame! (laughs)
That’s very cagey of you! (laughs) But then again, you’ve done this for quite a while.
Your approach is quite sophisticated, so I appreciate that. I also appreciate your effort because so often stuff like this just disappears from history.
Well, thank you, Dave. I’ve appreciated the chat and thank you for your time. We’ll make something out of it.
Thanks for your commitment and for pursuing me to do this. Take care.
You’re welcome.
________________________________________________
Interview conducted by Fred Van Wert on January 13, 2025
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By NASA
9 min read
Interview with Michiharu Hyogo, Citizen Scientist and First Author of a New Scientific Paper
Peer-reviewed scientific journal articles are the bedrock of science. Each one represents the culmination of a substantial project, impartially checked for accuracy and relevance – a proud accomplishment for any science team.
The person who takes responsibility for writing the paper must inevitably and repeatedly write, edit, and rewrite its content as they receive comments and constructive criticism from colleagues, peers, and editors. And the process involves much more than merely re-writing the words. Implementing feedback and polishing the paper regularly involves reanalyzing data and conducting additional analyses as needed, over and over again. The person who successfully climbs this mountain of effort can then often earn the honor of being named the first author of a peer-reviewed scientific publication. To our delight, more and more of NASA’s citizen scientists have taken on this demanding challenge, and accomplished this incredible feat.
Michiharu Hyogo is one of these pioneers. His paper, “Unveiling the Infrared Excess of SIPS J2045-6332: Evidence for a Young Stellar Object with Potential Low-Mass Companion” (Hyogo et al. 2025) was recently accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He conceived of the idea for this paper, performed most of the research using of data from NASA’s retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, and submitted it to the journal. We asked him some questions about his life and he shared with us some of the secrets to his success.
Q: Where do you live, Michi?
A: I have been living in Tokyo, Japan since the end of 2012. Before that, I lived outside Japan for a total of 21 years, in countries such as Canada, the USA, and Australia.
Q: Which NASA Citizen Science projects have you worked on?
A: I am currently working on three different NASA-sponsored projects: Disk Detective, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, and Planet Patrol.
Q: What do you do when you’re not working on these projects?
A: Until March of last year, I worked as a part-time lecturer at a local university in Tokyo. At the moment, I am unemployed and looking for similar positions. My dream is to work at a community college in the USA, but so far, my job search has been unsuccessful. In the near future, I hope to teach while also working on projects like this one. This is my dream.
Q: How did you learn about NASA Citizen Science?
A: It’s a very long story. A few years after completing my master’s degree, around 2011, a friend from the University of Hawaii (where I did my bachelor’s degree) introduced me to one of the Zooniverse projects. Since it was so long ago, I can’t remember exactly which project it was—perhaps Galaxy Zoo or another one whose name escapes me.
I definitely worked on Planet Hunters, classifying all 150,000 light curves from (NASA’s) Kepler observatory. Around the time I completed my classifications for Planet Hunters, I came across Disk Detective as it was launching. A friend on Facebook shared information about it, stating that it was “NASA’s first sponsored citizen science project aimed at publishing scientific papers”.
At that time, I was unemployed and had plenty of free time, so I joined without giving much thought to the consequences. I never expected that this project would eventually lead me to write my own paper — it was far beyond anything I had imagined.
Q: What would you say you have gained from working on these NASA projects?A: Working on these NASA-sponsored projects has been an incredibly valuable experience for me in multiple ways. Scientifically, I have gained hands-on experience in analyzing astronomical data, identifying potential celestial objects, and contributing to real research efforts. Through projects like Disk Detective,Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, and Planet Patrol, I have learned how to systematically classify data, recognize patterns, and apply astrophysical concepts in a practical setting.
Beyond the technical skills, I have also gained a deeper understanding of how citizen science can contribute to professional research. Collaborating with experts and other volunteers has improved my ability to communicate scientific ideas and work within a research community.
Perhaps most importantly, these projects have given me a sense of purpose and the opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge discoveries. They have also led to unexpected opportunities, such as co-authoring scientific papers — something I never imagined when I first joined. Overall, these experiences have strengthened my passion for astronomy and my desire to continue contributing to the field.
Q: How did you make the discovery that you wrote about in your paper?
A: Well, the initial goal of this project was to discover circumstellar disks around brown dwarfs. The Disk Detective team assembled more than 1,600 promising candidates that might possess such disks. These objects were identified and submitted by volunteers from the same project, following the physical criteria outlined within it.
Among these candidates, I found an object with the largest infrared excess and the fourth-latest spectral type. This was the moment I first encountered the object and found it particularly interesting, prompting me to investigate it further.
Although we ultimately did not discover a disk around this object, we uncovered intriguing physical characteristics, such as its youth and the presence of a low-mass companion with a spectral type of L3 to L4.
Q: How did you feel when your paper was accepted for publication?
A: Thank you for asking this question—I truly appreciate it. I feel like the biggest milestone of my life has finally been achieved!
This is the first time I genuinely feel that I have made a positive impact on society. It feels like a miracle. Imagine if we had a time machine and I could go back five years to tell my past self this whole story. You know what my past self would say? “You’re crazy.”
Yes, I kept dreaming about this, and deep down, I was always striving toward this goal because it has been my purpose in life since childhood. I’m also proud that I accomplished something like this without being employed by a university or research institute. (Ironically, I wasn’t able to achieve something like this while I was in grad school.)
I’m not sure if there are similar examples in the history of science, but I’m quite certain this is a rare event.
Q: What would you say to other citizen scientists about the process of writing a paper?
A: Oh, there are several important things I need to share with them.
First, never conduct research entirely on your own. Reach out to experts in your field as much as possible. For example, in my case, I collaborated with brown dwarf experts from the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 team. When I completed the first draft of my paper, I sent it to all my collaborators to get their feedback on its quality and to check if they had any comments on the content. It took some time, but I received a lot of helpful suggestions that ultimately improved the clarity and conciseness of my paper.
If this is your first time receiving extensive feedback, it might feel overwhelming. However, you should see it as a valuable opportunity—one that will lead you to stronger research results. I am truly grateful for the feedback I received. This process will almost certainly help you receive positive feedback from referees when you submit your own paper. That’s exactly what happened to me.
Second, do not assume that others will automatically understand your research for you. This seems to be a common challenge among many citizen scientists. First, you must have a clear understanding of your own research project. Then, it is crucial to communicate your progress clearly and concisely, without unnecessary details. If you have questions—especially when you are stuck — be specific.
For example, I frequently attend Zoom meetings for various projects, including Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and Disk Detective. In every meeting, I give a brief recap of what I’ve been working on — every single time — to refresh the audience’s memory. This helps them stay engaged and remember my research. (Screen sharing is especially useful for this.) After the recap, I present my questions. This approach makes it much easier for others to understand where I am in my research and, ultimately, helps them provide potential solutions to the challenges I’m facing.
Lastly, use Artificial Intelligence (AI) as much as possible. For tasks like editing, proofreading, and debugging, AI tools can be incredibly helpful. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I find it surprising that some people still do these things manually. In many cases, this can be a waste of time. I strongly believe we should rely on machines for tasks that we either don’t need to do ourselves or simply cannot do. This approach saves time and significantly improves productivity.
Q: Thank you for sharing all these useful tips! Is there anything else you would like to add?
A: I would like to sincerely thank all my collaborators for their patience and support throughout this journey. I know we have never met in person, and for some of you, this may not be a familiar way to communicate (it wasn’t for me at first either). If that’s the case, I completely understand. I truly appreciate your trust in me and in this entirely online mode of communication. Without your help, none of what I have achieved would have been possible.
I am now thinking about pushing myself to take on another set of research projects. My pursuit of astronomical research will not stop, and I hope you will continue to follow my journey. I will also do my best to support others along the way.
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Last Updated Mar 18, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
I’m really pleased that you agreed to take advantage of this opportunity. I don’t recall if I have actually met you personally, but if so, then I apologize for not remembering.
I don’t think so, although you’ve certainly signed things for me.
Well, I guess I have because I do remember seeing your name from time to time on various things. You’ve been at Ames a long time and we’ll have you talk about that in a little bit. The focus of these interviews is not specifically on your work. In fact, it was intended to broaden people’s understanding of who you are and what you do when you’re not at work, because we get compartmentalized and mostly get to know people through our work interactions, so we’ll be touching on your other interests. As you’ve seen if you’ve read some of these, we generally start with your childhood. I try to look up bios and things like that ahead of time to see what I can glean before these interviews but you don’t have a very substantial presence on the web.
I’m not a very public person.
I did find that out (laughs).
I did not volunteer for these and I tried to lay low until you hunted me down! (laughs)
Well, I think you’ll be pleased and as I said, you can stay as private as you want during this whole interview.
Sounds good.
We like to start with where you were born, your family at the time, what your parents did, if you have siblings, and then we ask when became aware of or developed an interest in what you have pursued as a career.
OK, and I’m going to be looking sideways at my notes because I printed out your list of questions and thought about them. Hopefully I won’t mess it up too much. I’m a big believer in the written word. I was born in Oakland, just up the Bay.
So was I, so we have a connection right there!
Up through my preteen years I grew up split between Oakland and North Lake Tahoe. My dad was a masonry contractor. When school got out in June we would go up to Tahoe where there was lots of work for him, building foundations for homes and so forth. When Christmas break came in school, we came back down to Oakland. We had a home in both places and dad could get work in the winter in the Bay Area. In the middle of every year during my preteen years, I switched between two schools. It was usually a bit of a jolt because the Oakland schools were ahead of the Tahoe schools, so there were a couple weeks of flailing about in January trying to catch up. They all used the same textbooks, but we were a couple of chapters behind at that point and had to catch up.
When I was 12, Dad had established his business well enough at Tahoe that my parents sold both of the houses, built a somewhat bigger one, and we moved to Tahoe permanently. So from seventh grade through high school it was all at the northern end of Lake Tahoe.
I have one sibling, a brother.
And when did I start thinking about becoming an astronomer? I can’t remember exactly, to be perfectly honest. I do remember my parents showing me the constellations. I can remember specifically which constellations my dad showed me and which ones my mom showed me. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested primarily in being an astronomer, but I probably went through an astronaut phase because it was the ‘60’s! I got an astronomy book for my birthday one year and I know it was before I could really read and understand it. I remember looking at the pictures. In thinking about this interview, I went back and looked. That book was published when I was five, so probably by the time I was five I was talking about it enough that I got this book for my birthday. I don’t have any similar books on other topics from that time. All the other books I have from back then are astronomy books for kids.
Well, you were living in Lake Tahoe, which by the elevation and the clarity and lack of ambient lights around you would have had a really good view of the stars and constellations.
Right. It was great. Although before we moved up there full time we were mostly there in the summer, so it didn’t get dark until after my bedtime. When we moved up there full time, then I could go out in the winter and yeah, we had a spectacular view of the southern sky. There were woods but we could see over the trees. We could see the center of the Milky Way, and so forth. I had binoculars and a couple of small telescopes that I’d use, along with a star atlas to point me toward interesting things to look at.
Did you say what your mother did? Did she work outside the home?
Mom was a writer. We traveled each year when we were growing up. She would write travelogues of those trips and try to get them published. She also wrote haiku poetry, and she tried her hand at writing other things. She was published a bit, but not a whole lot. Mom did get one of her travelogues published in the Christian Science Monitor. That was a highlight for her.
And was your brother older or younger?
My brother is two years younger, and we had somewhat similar trajectories. We’ll get to education later but he majored in physics as well. He followed me in similar universities, but ended up going into material sciences. He is now on the East Coast working for IBM.
That’s great.
He was named a Master Inventor in 2018.
A what?
A Master Inventor. He has over 200 patents, so IBM honored him with this title.
That’s quite an honor! Your education was interesting because of the split between the two schools. But then at some point, when you went to college, you had to declare a major. You said you had already developed an interest in astronomy, so did you pursue that science discipline right off the bat?
I went to UC Riverside for two years, and then I transferred to Caltech. My freshman year I really nailed down my choice for astronomy. I remember going to the Career Center and taking an interest survey, which has nothing to do with what you’re able to do. It just asks what you’re interested in doing, and it came up as physicist or musician. I have no musical skills so that pointed me in the other direction. I thought briefly about geology, since my dad had been a geology major, but I really settled on astronomy at that point, which is why I transferred. Riverside didn’t have an astronomy major, they only had a physics major. I really wanted to get an astronomy background and start on it early.
My time at Caltech was probably the toughest two years I’ve ever had. I was behind because I had gone to Riverside for two years and the Caltech student body was extremely competitive. Caltech was not generous with their transfer credits. I ended up taking a very heavy course load, but I did make it out in two years. From there I applied to a number of grad schools. I settled on Cornell for a couple reasons: First of all because they had groups working in the areas of astronomy I thought I was interested in, which were radio and infrared. Second of all, after four years in southern California I really wanted to go to a more rural setting to continue my education.
I have to ask this because when we’ve interviewed others who have gone to Cornell, most of them have mentioned the influence of Carl Sagan and I just wondered if that figured into your choice, or was he gone by the time you went there?
Well, I did meet Carl, at a second year reception he threw for the grad students. He was gone most of my first year working on Cosmos the television show. He had taken a leave of absence and wasn’t around. When he came back he threw a reception for all of us, and I got to shake his hand. He was a planetary scientist, of course, and that was not where I was aiming my trajectory. I didn’t see him a whole lot other than that one reception. Although from time to time the kind of people you really don’t want wandering around the halls would come around the building looking for Carl Sagan. Security would chase them down and get them out. These are really my most distinct memories of Carl.
And your PhD was in astronomy, not physics?
It was in astronomy and my dissertation was on radio astronomy. I did it almost exclusively at Arecibo (Arecibo Observatory, National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Arecibo, Puerto Rico) with a little bit at the VLA (Very Large Array Radio Telescope facility, near Socorro, New Mexico). I got to work with some really smart people at Cornell, observational and theoretical.
At this point we usually inquire about the connection or the influence, that brought you from your PhD to NASA Ames.
My degree was in radio astronomy but the other interest I always had along the way, which I hadn’t been able to look into, was infrared astronomy. Getting post docs is very competitive, back then we called them NRC’s. The NRC offer from Ed Erickson’s group at Ames was the best offer, so I came out for that. It wasn’t a sure thing, there was back and forth and the highest rated candidate had to turn down the job before they would make me an offer. But fortunately for me the highest rated candidate was my office mate at Cornell. I knew he was going to turn down the offer as soon as he got another one he wanted, so I was aware a little bit in advance of getting the call from Ed that things had worked out.
And Ed was your advisor?
Ed was my advisor. So I came and did two years as an NRC and then continued working with the group. I had made myself sufficiently useful that when I was ready to apply for other jobs, Ed offered me a raise if I’d stay with the group and continue working. That was a really good time. We flew on the KAO (Kuiper Airborne Observatory). They didn’t really have facility instruments, so we had our own instrument, but we did support observers from outside our group. We probably had more flights than any other instrument on the KAO during that period. It was a lot of flights. We had to operate it ourselves. All of us had our own particular jobs on flights. We did everything from prepping for the observations, writing proposals, all the way through to seeing them published. We were a small team: Ed Erickson, Mike Haas; Jan Simpson, and Bob Rubin on the science side helped out. We had a shop guy, Gene Beckstrom, and others after him. We had a lab technician, Jim Baltz. Dave Hollenbach would also work with us, and that was very rewarding. He was a very sharp guy in terms of theory, ideas and projects to do. Here is a photo of some of us with our instrument rack getting ready for a KAO flight:
Sean Colgan with his team on the KAO (Kuiper Airborne Observatory). So you came in on an NRC postdoctoral fellowship in the mid-‘80’s?
Yes, I started on October 6th, 1986.
And your first work was on the KAO and then probably a decade later you continued on SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy)?
It was ‘95 or ‘96 when they shut down the KAO to use the funding for SOFIA development. I remember the meeting still. It was in the upstairs auditorium and they came in and announced they were shutting the KAO down. I think it was Dave Morrison, who was the division chief, who told us not to whine about shutting it down because planetary missions sometimes had years when they didn’t have their facilities. In this case it was only going to be two years and we would be up and flying in 1997. Of course, as we know, it was more like ten years after that before we were even close to flying.
Yes, I thought the same thing, that it was not going to be two years. It always takes longer than that.
Well, I don’t think anybody thought it was going to be as many years as it was.
But you flew on both the KAO and SOFIA?
I had ninety nine flights on the Kuiper (KAO) because I kept track of them, and on SOFIA I had two flights, so I was not a flyer on SOFIA. It was more of a facility observatory, and the people who flew a lot were really part of the observatory. They were operating the telescope or operating a science instrument. My flights on SOFIA were because I had written some software for the GREAT Instrument (German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies, a modular dual-color heterodyne instrument for high-resolution far-infrared spectroscopy) to help them interface with SOFIA. I was along on those commissioning flights for GREAT in case my software broke. They wanted me on board. Interestingly by the rules at the time, I wouldn’t be allowed to actually fix the software in flight because it was flight software and had to go through all the reviews. None of the people who could do the reviews were on the airplane, but I could see how it broke and maybe I could suggest workarounds. It was not nearly as much fun for me as the KAO. I didn’t really have a job. The software had issues from time to time, but it basically worked. Everybody else had jobs, so for me it was less interesting, which is why I didn’t make a huge effort to keep flying on SOFIA.
Did you stay on the SOFIA project as a somewhat non flying support person?
Yes, from when the Kuiper stopped flying until about, well now, my primary work on SOFIA has been first with the project science team during development – trying to make sure they met our requirements, helping everybody understand our requirements, trying to make sure they weren’t making any huge mistakes. They made them anyway, especially when they didn’t listen to us, but we did our best. During the early years of SOFIA, I was also on the Ames team developing AIRES – a facility Science Instrument for SOFIA. I led the software effort, but the development was canceled in 2001. I then got involved with the software that people would use to propose to SOFIA, the proposal software, the software to estimate how long you should be asking for time, the sensitivity of the instruments, pieces of software like that. I worked with Dave Goorvich. We got software from other observatories as starting points and then modified them for SOFIA, software “re-use” they called it. And that was basically my main job throughout SOFIA’s lifetime. Once we developed those, the USRA (Universities Space Research Association) folks built their team around maintaining them and I joined that team because I’d been working on this software for so long. I also got into the package I mentioned to help GREAT interface to SOFIA. It basically made SOFIA look like the telescope that the GREAT team had been using for years, an observatory called KOSMA. We called it the translator and it translated KOSMA commands into SOFIA commands; then SOFIA housekeeping back into KOSMA housekeeping, so they didn’t need to change their software to work with SOFIA. As the aircraft started flying, it became quite clear that I was oversubscribed. I was not meeting my deadlines for either of those two efforts, so I gave up the translator. They hired another fellow to maintain that, although I stayed in touch with it for some years, helping him when he had questions and so forth. I then focused my main effort over on SOFIA’s DCS (Data Cycle System) side.
What has been your most interesting work here at Ames?
I’d say it was flying on the KAO, but very specifically it was Supernova 1987A which occurred after I had been here for only a couple of months. It went off in February of 1987. Nobody really knew what it would look like in the infrared to an instrument on an observatory like the KAO, so it was obviously a huge deal since it was the closest supernova for hundreds of years. Our team just completely redirected to carry out observations of the supernova. Dave Hollenbach and I worked together to try and figure out what we would see. We wrote up the science portion of the proposal,. For these observations, our instrument – the CGS (Cooled-Grating-Spectrometer) – had to be fairly substantially reworked in the sense that the grating needed to be changed to go to lower resolution and the detectors needed to be changed to get wider bandwidth and go to shorter wavelengths. Ed and Mike worked long days, weeks, and months to make all of those changes happen. In our proposal we made some predictions about which lines we could see, mostly iron lines, and which ionization states. We put that in the proposal, which was accepted. We then wrote up the proposal as a separate paper. When we went down and did the observations, we actually got some of it right. Surprisingly, iron was indeed bright. We thought we’d be seeing all different ionized states of iron, from singly, doubly, triply ionized iron, when in fact it was very much concentrated in singly ionized iron with a little bit of doubly ionized iron, there was a faint line there. We had gotten the temperatures right, but we didn’t quite get the ionization right. We were in the ballpark, so I think this was really the most interesting work in that when we started nobody had really seen anything like it before. We were starting from very basic principles, and we followed that all the way through to a nice series of papers. We went down for three different epochs because the lines were changing with time as the supernova ejecta expanded. We obtained three sets of measurements, which resulted in three papers.
What I’m currently working on? Well, SOFIA is, of course, shut down and I am working as part of the shutdown process. We’re trying to reprocess a lot of the data to bring it up to standard, especially the older data. We learned more about the instruments as time went on, so we can now do a better job of reducing the data. I’m helping out with reducing the data, getting it into the archive as we shut down, and of course, writing proposals.
What comes next? So far I’ve collaborated mainly with Naseem, whom you have spoken to, Sarah Nickerson, whom you also have spoken to, and Doug Hoffman (whom we’ve also spoken to). So that’s proposals.
How is your work relevant to Ames and the NASA mission?
Well, I’ve worked on NASA missions almost my entire career, so I think that’s the closest to relevance as you can get.
What is a typical day like for you?
I mostly work, well before the pandemic in my office, but now it’s back and forth. I do like to come into the office although this week is a little different. That’s why we’re doing this interview from home. My wife is out of town and I like to work at home on those weeks just to keep the dog out of trouble. So I’m at a computer. I’m a software guy and a data analysis guy, not a lab guy, so I work at the computer. I actually have several computers on my desk. I look like a real developer (laughs). If you see my desk, I’ve got a couple of big screens and couple of computers underneath hooked up to different things and I can switch them around. So that’s a typical day, but at home it’s a little tougher. I don’t have a desk that can really manage the big screens, so I’ve just got one little laptop screen to work with.
Is home close enough that the pandemic shut down of the Center didn’t really save you a whole lot of commute time?
I live across the Bay in Newark, which physically is not far, but traffic wise is not good. I typically come in later and stay later because that works with my wife’s schedule and also works with the traffic. We’re not so close that it’s easy. I hated during the pandemic having to work at home all the time because of the small screen and with no room to spread out piles of paper or stay organized. That was definitely a challenge. I was very glad to get back on site.
What do you like most and least about your job?
Most would be doing science, but I also enjoy coding. Least is probably the standard sorts of things that most people whine about when given any opportunity. All the stuff that goes with the job that isn’t science or coding, like IT security and paperwork. Right now I’m in the midst of training, taking courses I’ve taken every year for the last ten years, which gets a little old after a while, things like that. But somebody thinks you need to do it, and I hope it makes us a better organization for everybody doing it.
Do you have a favorite memory from your career? Or perhaps a research finding or breakthrough, or an unexpected research result?
My favorite memory would be the Supernova 1987A work in general. We found some unexpected things there and we got some things right.
If you could have a dream job, what would it be?
My dream job is pretty close to what I have. Pretty close without all the extra stuff.
What advice would you give to someone who wants a career like yours?
Of course you’ve got to work hard, and you need to have an aptitude for it. It’s a very competitive field, so you’ve also got to realize that luck, or being in the right place at the right time, can be a factor in whether you continue or not. I’ve had colleagues who were very good at what they do, but they just weren’t in the right place at the right time. They ended up leaving the field or doing something less than what they hoped. Some things are just out of your control.
I did get lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I flew on the Kuiper, and I developed skills. When SOFIA started, those skills were very much in demand. That was my right place, right time moment, which is when I joined the civil service. I had been a contractor after my NRC ended through 1997. I became a civil servant then because there was so much work on SOFIA. I don’t know if that’s helpful advice, but it’s just my take on things.
Well, you’re right. There’s something to being in the right place, at the right time and being prepared, but there’s always the serendipity aspect, which is just part of life. You could have wound up somewhere else and been just as happy, you know.
Oh yes, It doesn’t necessarily relate to happiness, but you’ve got to make the best with what you have. I do feel lucky about that.
Would you like to share anything about your family? Kids, pets, activities? You mentioned a dog?
I’m going to mix the order up a little bit.
Sure, go ahead.
The accomplishment I’m most proud of that’s not science related would be 40 years of marriage to my fabulous wife. We just celebrated our 40th anniversary about a week and a half ago.
Congratulations! That is indeed an accomplishment.
So, no children but we do have a dog, a little Welsh Corgi. She’s our second corgi and she is just great. We do enjoy traveling. Typically, we’ll go on vacation in August. often to Europe. We’ve visited the UK five or six times, France a couple of times, Italy a couple of times. My father-in-law was born in Hungary, so we’ve gone there a couple times. Here is a photo of us at Lake Louise in 2019, with our Corgi.
Sean Colgan with his wife and Corgi at Lake Louise in 2019 What do we do for fun the rest of the time? Besides leisure travel, I enjoy gardening. We also enjoy musical events. We have season tickets to the San Jose Opera, for example, and we’ll go up to San Francisco for concerts a couple of times a year. We probably have an event every other month. During the pandemic, the restaurants and movie theaters were closed, but wineries with outdoor spaces were open. They started serving food during the pandemic, and they allowed dogs, so we got in the habit of doing a lot of wine tasting on weekends just to get out. We still do some of that. To celebrate our 40th, we went up to Napa and tasted a lot of great wines. (laughs)
You mentioned that you’re not particularly musical, so you don’t play an instrument or anything, but you enjoy music and opera.
I enjoy listening to music. I played instruments as a child but had no particular talent for it, so. . . .
Do you like to read? And if so, any particular genre?
I read a fair bit, and it’s sort of divided. For entertainment, I’ll read fantasy and science fiction, but when we go on our trips, I’m always buying books about what we’re doing. For example, if we go to France and visit cathedrals, I’ll buy books about how they built cathedrals; or in England I’ll read about old Stone Age tombs. Everybody’s heard about Stonehenge, but there are stone circles and other stacks of stones, big ones, all over the landscape, so I will buy books and read about them. I have books about Roman battle tactics, etc. Oh yes, and I also have a lot of geology books, depending on where we go. When we went to the Canadian Rockies, I got a lot of geology books about that locale. I bring those home, stack them up, and read them, hopefully before the next trip. So yes, a lot of reading. When my wife travels, sometimes I’ll go hiking. She’s gone up to 15-20 weekends a year She’s a textile artist.She teaches lacemaking, which is the way they used to make lace by hand, before machines. There are groups around the country that enjoy lacemaking, so she travels to teach workshops for them on weekends.
Wow, that’s fascinating!
This week, she’s actually up in Sparks, next to Reno, where the National Convention is going on. It moves around every year, but this year it’s relatively close. She travels a lot for that, which keeps her busy. When she’s away, our dog and I will sometimes go for hikes, if we don’t have too much other stuff to do. Interestingly, we are not the only astronomer-lacemaker couple in the world (laughs). There’s an Australian couple – Ron and Jay Ekers – with Jay a lacemaker and Ron an astronomer. We had dinner with them once when they were visiting in the Bay Area because our wives knew each other. My wife had once traveled down to teach in Australia. Normally she just travels around the U.S., but she has done some international trips.
Now, is this manual lacemaking with needles and thread or . . . ?
There can be needles and thread. That’s one form of it. What my wife teaches is “bobbin lace”, which is made on a pillow usually stuffed with straw. Two bobbins are connected by a thread with many of these pairs used to weave threads together to create the pattern. Photos of Louise’s designs are on her website – https://colganlacestudio.com/. Here’s a photo of what a lace pillow looks like.
“Bobbin lace”, which is made on a pillow usually stuffed with straw. Two bobbins are connected by a thread with many of these pairs used to weave threads together to create the pattern Interesting. And when did she get interested in this? Was it something she learned as a child, from her mother or grandmother?
No, it was at Cornell. She was in grad school there, which is where we met.
And what was her course of study?
She was in a Master’s program for historic preservation, basically how to preserve old buildings, of which there are many in upstate New York and few in the Bay Area. She had finished her class work, and I still had several years to go on my dissertation. She looked around for something to fill her time, and one of her friends – a colleague in her department – had already taken this up, and brought her to a meeting. She started taking classes from a local teacher, and by the time we moved west, she was well-versed. Not many people out here knew how to do it, so she started taking on students.
So I’m calculating back, since I’m a numbers guy, that if you just celebrated your 40th anniversary, then you must have married her while you were still in grad school?
Yes, about halfway through grad school, in 1983.
Interesting. So you’re a little bit responsible for her developing this interest in lacemaking?
I wouldn’t claim any of that.
But you’re responsible for giving her the time to develop this interest in lacemaking that she has done so well in.
It was all her effort. If anything, I made conditions difficult for her, and she found her way out (laughs). That’s probably the way I would phrase it.
Fair enough. But it’s very interesting. I like when we can poke around a little bit and find out interesting things, because then people who read this will say, “Well, I didn’t know that he went there or that his wife does lacemaking or the other things that you’ve talked about. That’s part of the purpose of these interviews. Who or what inspires you?
That was a real easy one for me: the night sky. It’s not so great in the Bay Area most times, but there’s so much going on up there. I mean, it’s really all laid out for you. Since I studied and read about a lot about the sky as a kid, I know my way around it. a I also know fun little facts, so that’s entertaining to recall as well. When you get up in the mountains, of course it’s just beautiful.
I feel the same way. I don’t see how anyone can look up at and ponder the night sky and not be just fascinated by it. The questions that come up about what it is, how it came to be, what its purpose is, if there is one, and all of that is just fascinating.
Yes, I agree.
Do you have a favorite image, of space or anything that is particularly meaningful to you?
You know I don’t have one now. I mean, there are a lot of very nice ones out there. A big favorite I remember as a kid was a photo of H and Chi Persei, which is a double cluster of stars, not globular clusters but open clusters. It’s very colorful, with red stars and white stars and blue stars in the image – and just imagining it so far away, but these particular stars are so close together. I don’t know much about it, but something about it just impressed me. A photo like what I remember is at https://www.astrobin.com/337742/.
The reason we ask about images is because we like to include them in the post, especially about things you’ve talked about. You mentioned for example, the Supernova 1987A. If a picture from SOFIA came out of that it would be a great addition to this interview. And then maybe you have a picture of you and the corgi on a hike, or your wife doing lace work, anything like that would be great.
Well, we’ll work on that.
[Photo thoughts: The three of us from Lake Louise, link to H & Chi Persei photo on the web, Lace Pillow showing bobbins]
That would be for when you return it after editing. By the way the transcript is a living document so you can make changes right on it and that’s how it will go in. It isn’t all that formal, we’re not tracking edits or anything like that. We’ll add your pictures and get to a point where it’s set up as it would be when it gets posted and then we’ll send it to you for a final check. We’re also several months out in terms of the queue of those that are going to be posted, so it won’t be immediate.
Good.
We’ve posted about 50 of these, but we’ve done another 20 that are in various stages of being made ready. We’ve sent them out but haven’t gotten them back yet because everybody’s so busy. We do have a last question and that is do you have a favorite quote? One that you find meaningful, or witty, or clever, that kind of thing?
I did think about it. Sometimes you asked the question in the online ones about inspirational quotes and this is definitely not inspirational.
It doesn’t have to be.
I was hoping that because you didn’t say it here. My favorite quote is one my mom said a lot when I was growing up. She always attributed it to her father. I actually looked it up on the web, because I would have thought Mark Twain perhaps said it. It doesn’t seem that anybody famous has said it though. The reference is in a book from just ten years ago. The quote is: “The reward for good work is more work.”
Ah, I like that. That’s clever and witty and seems to be true.
Right.
One of my favorite quotes which I don’t think I put into my post because there’s so many of them is from Mike Griffin, former NASA Administrator. He was talking with the press, I think about risk management and why we do things that don’t always work out. He was explaining that there’s always a risk, and if you don’t accept the risk, then you don’t make progress, but they kept questioning him and pushing back on that idea. And he said, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.” And I thought, that’s a good line!
Anyway, you ran the table here on the questions and I appreciate that you prepared ahead of time and wrote some notes down, which made the interview go very well.
As I said, I prefer the written word. I’m not as good at thinking on my feet.
Is there something that you wish we had asked or had put down as a topic that we didn’t, that you would like to add here? And you can certainly add or change anything when we send this back. There’s a note on the transcript that you have full creative control. So if you wanted to say something but didn’t, you can type in an entire extra paragraph or extra question, or remove and cut out an entire section.
And with that, I’ll take the recording and start putting it on a paper and within a couple of weeks, I’ll send you the initial draft and then you can do with it as you wish and send any pictures or anything that relate to things that you talked about and then we’ll get it ready and put it in the queue and eventually you’ll get perhaps a few of your entitled 15 minutes of fame when this goes up. I will add that it goes up on the public side of the of the website so that your family or your friends, anybody can access it and read it.
So if somebody googles names of interviews you’ve done, the links to the interviews come up.
Well, I hope that doesn’t cause you heartburn.
I’ve thought about that as I was phrasing my answers, and changed some passwords so I can include names in the photo captions
I hadn’t thought of that aspect of it, but you’re probably right.
Yeah.
I never know what’s going to touch someone’s concerns.
Well, just to be careful.
(Mark) There’s another thing that even after we publish, we can still edit them years into the future. Everything on the main sites can be changed at any given moment. Also, Fred, just to note, our interviews rank pretty high on the Google rankings. Usually when you Google someone’s name and then NASA, our interviews are near the top of their results, like on the first screen that comes up.
(Fred) Oh, really? I didn’t know that.
(Mark) Yeah. This is a pretty good series, people check it out a lot.
Which means that people googling names are clicking on the interviews and reading them.
(Mark) People read these a lot.
(Fred) The other series I do for the website is “Interesting Fact of the Month”. Steve Howell suggested that would be a nice addition as we try to attract traffic to the website, and I heard a year or so ago that it was the top item on the code ST website, it got the most hits.
(Mark) Yes, you’ve got spots one and two on your side projects!
(Fred) Well, Sean, I appreciate that you were able to overcome your initial hesitation and take the time to work with us on this and I think you’ll be pleased with how it comes out. Thank you very much for being so organized.
Thank you for your time.
Interview conducted by Fred Van Wert and Mark Vorobets on June 29, 2023
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By NASA
Let’s begin by Inquiring into your early years, your childhood, where you were born, where you grew up, what your family was like? Do you have siblings? What did your parents do, and how young were you when you developed an interest in what has become your career?
I was born in Boston. My mom lived in Vermont at the time, so it’s kind of a home state. We moved to the Washington DC area, to Alexandria, when I was about four. I have a brother whose name is Ian. He is not quite 2 years older than I am. He lives in Maine. Unfortunately, my mom, my father, and my stepfather, I’ll talk all about them, none of them are with us anymore. When my mom lived in Vermont, she was a postal carrier but was dissatisfied with that life. She had been an executive at the age of 22 In New York City, in the early 1960’s, which was very unusual at the time. She worked for the Wool Bureau.
For the what bureau? The Wool Bureau? I didn’t know there was one.
You’ve seen the wool label in wool clothes? The one that says “It’s Real Wool”? Well, that’s her. She actually made that happen. She’s the one who turned that into a nationwide thing. Anyway, she and my father parted ways when I was quite young, so she was a single mother and decided that she was going to take a one way trip to Virginia to throw herself into the mill there. She started a newsletter as a single parent with two little kids.
I was five years old when Star Wars came out. The movie had a pretty significant effect on my life, particularly given that the main character has the same name I do. But my first inkling that I wanted to do something associated with the stars and space exploration may have actually come a little bit before that, when I was four. One day we were at a laundromat, and I was left in the back of the station wagon. Let’s remember that this was the ‘70s. My mom had some library books in the car, and there was this book on astronomy. I was young enough at the time that reading for me was still very new, and I looked at big paragraphs as scary things. I remember just looking at the pictures of the stars and thinking how wonderful it all was. And by the time I was nine years old it was all over and I wanted to be – am I really going say this to the whole world? – I wanted to be a scientist, an engineer, and an astronaut. All those things.
What’s the matter with saying that to the whole world? Those are laudable goals.
What I wanted to do at such an early age seems embarrassing but the fun part is I’ve actually gotten two of the three.
Yes!
I suppose I’ve made my peace with it all. I had figured out very early that I wanted to be in science, but my stepfather didn’t think much of it. He used to tell me things like “a physicist is a boy with a toy” and other disparaging things about my chosen vocation. We moved from Alexandria to Calvert County, Maryland, and I lived there from the age of 9 to 14. So I spent those really formative years in what I felt as a kid to be a very boring part of the world with not a lot of friends, and I was an intense geek at the time. Being a geek is OK now, being a nerd is cool, right? We’re all nerds. That wasn’t true when I was ten, and so I didn’t have the best time growing up. I was so dissatisfied with life in Calvert County that I decided I was going to get the heck out of Dodge and go to college, and so I did that at the age of 14 by going to Simon’s Rock College in Western Massachusetts. I was there for two years and then I went to the University of Maryland. But there was a little problem for me, going to college at 14: I’d never done homework. Homework wasn’t a thing for me. I didn’t care. If you’re in college and you sit down at the physics class, I was the kid that you despised because I was the kid that would come in, take the test, and ace it, having never done anything.
Well, let me interrupt because you mentioned that you went to college at age 14 and I was about to ask if you were in Mensa or something? Because that’s quite an accomplishment to be able to do that. And then you said you didn’t do any homework, and that’s even more amazing. So how did that come about? Do you just have natural ability?
Truth is, I was actually bored and it was kind of unhealthy. The not doing homework thing is really bad, you don’t want to do that. I got over it later, I’ll come to that, but I’ve learned lots of lessons on the way, chief of which is that brains are neither necessary nor sufficient a condition to do great things in life. It helps, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. Anyway, I was never in Mensa, I never bothered with Mensa. I went to one Mensa meeting and I found it impossibly boring. So yeah, I was a little bit weird. I was a little bit of a mutant in school but truth is, I was terribly bored and I only started doing better in school when they skipped me a grade and started letting me skip ahead and do other things. I started doing summer programs with the Center for Advancement of Academically Talented Youth (CTY). They sent me to Arizona State University for a summer. I went to Franklin and Marshall University in Pennsylvania the following summer. I learned Greek. After that I went to the Rock, but when I was 16, I went to the University of Maryland as a junior . . . and promptly fell apart because you can get away with what I did for only so long. Not doing homework might have worked in the introductory physics classes, but once I got into the upper division classes, that’s when reality hit and it hit hard. I was weeded out. I flunked out of physics. I did. My last semester as a physics major the first time around I had a C, a D and an F on my transcript in physics. I got a C in quantum mechanics, largely because the professor was being kind. I got a D in electricity and magnetism because that’s what I deserved, and I got an F in my lab class. My lab class! Remember that one for later, because I absolutely deserved it. I did nothing. I was horrible. I was really out of it.
You have more than the average number of degrees, so I’m trying to put this all together. You’re going to walk us through how that all came about, right? How despite all this you are very well credentialed?
Yeah, I can do that. So I got the C, D and the F and my stepfather, who never wanted me to be a physicist anyway, took the opportunity, since I’d been in college for 4 1/2 years, to apply a little pressure. And so he said to me: “You will graduate by the end of the year or you’re just out. We’re not paying for you anymore.” And I said (to myself), “Well, I want to graduate, so what can I graduate in?” And I thought, I can graduate in German, because in addition to physics, I had also been taking German classes. I’ve also studied Russian, Latin, Greek, Gothic and Middle High German. So I know a very little bit of a whole bunch of languages, but I love language. Language is great!
Let me jump in here again because I saw that German was one of your B.A. degrees and I thought, well maybe you have German ancestry and you were trying to connect in that way with your family history?
Nope. The closest my family gets to Germany is that my grandfather’s parents came from Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus near the Polish border. It was invaded by Germany. They were Jews.
Well, that wasn’t what I was thinking. I thought perhaps Sollitt might be a German name. But anyway, this is very impressive. Please continue.
OK. Well so I flunked out and I thought, well, I can get a degree in German because I’ve been studying German. I started taking German when I was 12 or something, 11 or 12, and I kept at it. Then I did Russian for a couple of years. I did German when I transferred to University of Maryland, so I said “I can do that”. I had to take all the senior level requirements in a single semester. The chairman of the department said, “I don’t think you’re going to make it” but I did and he wasn’t very happy: I didn’t do any homework. It wasn’t a big deal to take a couple of summer classes, and then I was out. I got my degree in German, a degree that I had never wanted. I had wanted a physics degree. And I was 19, I had just turned 19. I was, in fact, a little disappointed that I didn’t get my degree at age 18, but I got it at 19, and graduated in August of 1990. That was right around the time when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we had the biggest recession since the Great Depression, and you had Harvard graduates waiting tables in Boston, that was all they could get. That was the environment into which I graduated with my unwanted degree in German with, you know, some lousy grades, although my GPA wasn’t awful. My first job was doing temp work for WFTY-TV channel 50. I did accounts receivable. I worked with a temp agency and I had to learn the job of accounts receivable by taking the test to see if I could do the job. So I thought “I don’t know how to do this, but OK, I’ll take the test.” It’s like this is how you do this and that’s how you do that, so OK, you can do receivables now! I worked for them for a couple months and then I went through the Administrative Careers with America test, a very, very brief resurrection of the Civil Service Exam. And very foolishly, where it said you can indicate where you’re willing to work, for some insane reason, I said “Los Angeles.” I’d never been there but it sounded like fun. So I put that down as a potential location, with a bunch of other places, and the only offer I got was from the Internal Revenue Service in the Los Angeles district.
I read about the IRS in your bio, and I was going to ask about it, so please tell us about that experience.
I was employed as a Revenue Officer.
It so doesn’t fit with what you’ve been telling us about who you are. But go ahead (laughs).
Let’s just say it’s been a circuitous route! I joined the IRS as a Revenue Officer in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, thanking my lucky stars that I had an actual job. And it was for a rather miserable salary that I drove my mom’s car across the country to get there. A Revenue Officer is the person who knocks on doors and collects the taxes. I was hired as a GS-7. This was not a job that I liked. In fact, it was a job I viscerally hated but I did this job for nearly 4 1/2 years of my life. It taught me some really important lessons.
My first lesson came on the very first day, when I attended a training session for hundreds of people (there had been a huge District-wide hire). About the first thing the first speaker said was that because we are now in the government, we must not only avoid impropriety, but the very appearance of impropriety. And that is something that I have lived by ever since. I think it’s the way you must be. I was in what they sometimes call retail government. My job was to literally go knock on doors of delinquent taxpayers and say, “Hi, you owe the government money or there are government tax returns that you haven’t filed”. I would do this driving my own car. And back in 1991, when I started, April of 1991, I was 19 years old. One taxpayer joked that he didn’t realize that the IRS was hiring from high school these days! (laughs) Yeah, I looked pretty young. I started off wearing a suit and tie and the whole bit with the badge and everything. Everybody was terrified of me. So I ditched the suit. I ditched the tie. I grew my hair out. I wore rumpled blue jeans and a rumpled shirt. I mean, I looked terrible. But everybody talked to me. I never brought out the pocket commission unless I had to. And what I found was that I ended up being really, really good at the job. I was the number two rated Revenue Officer at GS-9, the year I was rated in the district. The first-rated GS-9 Revenue Officer in LA District that year was a really nice lady named Gail, a really neat lady, a grandmother.
As a Revenue Officer, my attitude was markedly different from many. I didn’t approach delinquent taxpayers as, well, delinquents. I just went there thinking that they were people with a problem that needed to get fixed. My attitude was, “Hi, I’m from the IRS, I’m here to help, and I’m serious. Let me help you”. I never, ever, ever wanted to seize things. I never seized a car. I never seized a house. Other people did. They were keen to do it but I wasn’t. I managed to avoid all that stuff by basically dealing with taxpayers like real people. And I ended up closing tons and tons and tons of cases, something like three or four times as many cases as the next person in my group, because of the way I dealt with people, treating them differently, respectfully.
I got my GS-11 at the age of 22. I was the youngest GS-11 that anyone could think of, and one day one of my co-workers said that I would eventually be the Assistant Commissioner of the IRS. That idea filled me with dread… But I mean no disrespect to the hardworking Revenue Officers and others at the IRS – their job is truly thankless, but so utterly necessary. So I was doing the job, although I despised it, and then one of the best jobs in the IRS came up, which was to do the exact same job for the International District. I transferred to L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC and International sent me as far as eastern Canada for my first training trip. I went from Montreal to Quebec City to New Brunswick to Halifax to Prince Edward Island to Newfoundland. What a great trip. It was wonderful. I met interesting new people and it’s a very different sort of thing there because you have no enforcement authority whatsoever. You basically have to ask very nicely, but I was pretty good at that because that’s how I did my job in LA.
Had people gone there to escape the oversight of the IRS?
No, it’s not that they were trying to escape the long arm of the IRS, it’s just that people who live abroad still have U.S. tax obligations. They still have to pay tax on their worldwide income, whether they live in America or live outside of America. A U.S. citizen living in Canada still has to file a U.S. tax return, and they run into tax trouble, too.
But you were talking about enforcement authority. You don’t have it in Canada or overseas, right?
Yeah, the way it works is the revenue officer gets a case once it’s been through the automated collection system. Automated collection systems are at the big IRS centers and they’re the ones who make the phone calls, send the registered letters, and all that stuff. I’m not sure what they do today. This was 30 years ago. And once the automated collection system runs through all the stuff they do, they ship it out to revenue officers who go and knock on the doors and say “You need to talk to me”. And if they get ignored, or they don’t comply with the agreements that they make with the revenue officer, which would have to be signed off by group managers, then the Revenue Officer can take action under civil enforcement authority. Civil enforcement authority includes things like seizures and levies. You can levy wages, you can levy bank accounts, you can levy rents. You can levy any form of income, any asset. You can place a notice of federal tax lien on the person, which then attaches to all their real estate. You can actually make seizures of anything a taxpayer owns. If they have nice artwork, you can seize that, too. It’s a lot of power, and to be honest it’s pretty scary. But the reason you can do that is because the long arm of federal law exists throughout the country.
When you go to a place like Canada, you’re way past federal law. You can’t seize anything or levy anything unless there’s a tax treaty with that country. And if there is, then you can do things according to the way the treaty is written. I think in Canada that enforcement was done through requests to Revenue Canada. But to first order, you have no power in Canada, so what you’re reduced to is “Let’s try to make this work”, because if you have somebody who’s been living in Canada for 40 years and doesn’t want to go back, well, then their obvious move is to renounce U.S. citizenship and tell you to go away. That’s if they never want to go back, if they don’t care about their U.S. citizenship. But most folks do.
Anyway, so I did that trip and I was planning my next one, until one day, and you have to understand I went to the University of Maryland in College Park, which is literally down the road from L’Enfant Plaza. It’s like 10 miles away or so, and I was back in familiar areas. In fact, I grew up in the area when I lived in Maryland and Alexandria, so I knew the place really, really well. I was living on Capitol Hill at the time. And one day, I’m not kidding here, at International, I was literally sitting at my desk scribbling physics equations, just like the Gary Larson cartoon (The Far Side): “What’s this? Jenkins, physics equations? Do you enjoy your job here as a cartoonist?” The cartoon character Jenkins, was literally me. I was scribbling physics equations, and I looked down and I said, “Oh, God, I really have unfinished business”. So I went right up to the University of Maryland, to my old faculty advisor, a guy named Joe Redish. And I marched into his office, waved my hand, and said “Hi, Joe. How do I restart? How do I get back in? What do I do?” And he started off listing books for me on how to get ready for it, saying “Do this book, do that book”. And then he stopped, thought about it for a moment, and said “No, forget all that. Go get the Feynman Lectures on Physics and give them a read.” And I said “OK, sure”. So I got the Feynman Lectures on Physics and started reading them. They’re brilliant. I mean brilliant.
I’m sure they are.
But they’re not effective if you’re learning physics for the first time. It’s the last thing you want to do. It is effective if you’re doing something like what I was doing, which is getting back into the field or getting a different perspective, or as a great reference book. They’re wonderful for the right purposes, and I started reading the Feynman lectures that summer. I read them every day, all day. I read them on the subway to and from work. I read them on lunch hour. I read them on breaks. And as I read the lectures, I finally decided that I had to see about going back to school. So I went back up to the University of Maryland, walked into the registrar’s office and said “OK, I graduated a bunch of years ago and I want to come back. What’s the process?” And they said, “Well, here’s a 3×5 card. Fill it out, please.” So I filled it out and handed it back to them, and they said “You’re in!” And I said, “What? That’s it?” I just filled out a 3×5 card and then arranged for student loans.
I told my mom what I was doing – I was talking to her about returning to physics before I re-enrolled. She was very, very supportive of my going back to get my physics degree. It was unfinished business. But I didn’t tell my stepfather right away because I knew he wouldn’t approve. I knew I would have to tell him eventually. My opportunity came on Father’s Day, 1995. By this time, my Mom and stepfather had divorced. But it was a crowded affair: my step-siblings were there with spouses and families, other friends were there. And I finally announced to everyone what I was going to do at the end of summer, which was leave the IRS and go back to school to get my degree in physics. Everybody in the room congratulated me, saying what a wonderful idea that was, and isn’t that great. Except my stepfather. He didn’t say a word. I knew he would not be happy about this – especially the way I ambushed him with it, in front of this huge crowd. But I knew that I absolutely had to present my decision as a fait accompli: if I had gone to him to tell him I was thinking about doing this, he would have been on me until I dropped it. At the end of the day I was the last person there and he walked up to me and he said, “I don’t know how to react to this news, that you’re going back to school. It’s as if you’ve told me that you’re quitting your successful government career to go back and study remedial English”. That’s a quote.
Oh my!
Yeah.
So it wasn’t just a matter that he was paying for your education. He really objected to what you wanted to become through your education.
Yes, that’s why he would say things like “A physicist is a boy with a toy”. He saw physicists as unserious, as non-intellectuals, which is a huge mistake.
I should say.
But I went back and set myself a goal. Now you remember those classes that I got the C, the D, and the F in? I registered for the same three classes and the graduate secretary told me “You can’t do that. It’s too much work. You’re going to die!” But I thought that I needed to do it and I knew if I got 3 A’s I was doing the right thing. If I got one A or less, I knew that at least I’d given it the good college try. I’d gone back and addressed this one great failure in my life, one that made my whole life feel incomplete. At least I’d done it and I could move on to other things in life now and not worry about it anymore. If I got two A’s, I didn’t know what it would mean, but if I got three A’s, I knew it was cool.
So I went back and within two weeks, I was just drowning in the work. It turns out there’s a Physics Class Invariance Principle: every upper division undergraduate physics class takes 20 hours of homework per week. 20 hours, plus all the time that you’re in class. Three classes means 60 hours of work per week, more than a full-time job. But my attitude was very different in that I now had five years of work experience under my belt. I had been away from physics for five years when I went back and my attitude was that I went to Maryland in the morning and my classes were just part of my work day. I spent the rest of the day working in the library and other places at Maryland, and I went home at night, and was done, except when I started having experiments.
I remember that first semester I was in the advanced undergraduate lab, the one I had got the F in, and something had changed. Suddenly, it was my favorite class! I had the exact same lab manual, and I despised it just as much the second time around. Only this time I had enough confidence to look at it and say, “This thing is horribly written. I mean, this is awful. Where does this come from? Oh, they have a source in here. Adrian Melissinos.” Anyway, it was Melissinos’ “Experiments in Modern Physics”. I went and found it in the library and started reading it and that became my textbook. Not just that book – I looked up every single source cited in all those experiment write-ups: books, monographs, reference materials. One of the sources was the book “Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy” by Kai Siegbahn. I read the source material to actually learn what they were doing, and I had a blast. Oh my God, that was fun! I mean fun.
One of the most fun things I did was the cosmic ray experiment. It was a timing experiment that used scintillator paddles. As a particle passed through a scintillator paddle, it would knock electrons off of the sodium iodide crystals. The electrons would be reabsorbed into the matrix, releasing light that would then be picked up by photomultiplier tubes. The four paddles were hooked up to some simple logic boards to generate a coincidence circuit, where a coincidence gate would be opened by triggering the first paddle. You’d get simple yes/no signals from subsequent paddles, and if you got four yesses (energy deposited in each of the paddles within the timing gate duration), you’d have a coincidence, and add that particle to your measured cosmic ray flux. You learn something about the energies of the cosmic rays by varying the shielding between pairs of scintillator paddles. More shielding means you get fewer yesses in the paddles below the shielding. And I thought, OK, that’s cool. What about trying a direct measurement of the energies of these things?
I went to the professor, Phillip Roos, who was a member of the board of directors of the Jefferson Laboratory (the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, a high-energy electron-positron collider in Virginia). He loaned me a very thick scintillator and I started doing actual spectroscopy with this thing. And I learned all about the Landau curve. Basically, it’s what happens when a high energy particle penetrates a thin layer. How much energy does it give up? It’s a quasi-stochastic process, but the distribution of energies deposited in the layer by particles from a monoenergetic beam is something called the Landau Curve. It is incredibly complicated and way past the purview of an undergraduate class to try to model or do anything with. But I did my best. And so I put that together as one of my experiments for the class and I just absolutely loved it. I just loved it.
In quantum mechanics, I absolutely died. Completely. And I realized that I had major problems. I even had a call with my mom, telling her “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing”. Looking for a way forward, I realized I couldn’t do it myself. I needed to join a study group, so I started looking around, asking folks, “Can I join your study group?” And I kept getting the cold shoulder. What I didn’t realize was that they didn’t have study groups. And finally, at one point I just said OK, nobody wants me to join their study group, not realizing they didn’t exist, and I decided to do a study group of my own. I started inviting people, and they were eager to join. Quantum mechanics is still the thing I know best from that period, because I ended up teaching it. I had about five or six people, mostly from a student group called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). It was the undergraduate space exploration gang. And I ended up teaching them quantum mechanics. It was wonderful, you’re jumping into it and the book is throwing all the math at you up front, like it’s hitting you with a baseball bat. And at the same time, I took E&M as well. In that class I did actually fall in with a couple of guys and the three of us became an established study group for that and kept it going for a number of classes.
But it ended up being 20 hours a week per class, 60 hours easy. I was in the lab at times until midnight or later, as well as on weekends, and I ended up getting 3 A’s! So in the end, I did it right. So I stuck around. I could have finished my degree in a year but I had a strategy: I wanted to get into a good grad school and I figured that no grad school would touch me with those C, D, & F grades on my transcript. Remember those? I think a C or a D in one of my math classes is really bad, but I knew no one would touch me if I didn’t have really, really good follow up grades, so I needed to take two years, not one. So that’s what I did and I also knew that I needed a really good recommendation to get into a good grad school, so I signed up with something that fell out of the cosmic ray work. Originally, I didn’t understand what I was getting with the energy measurements from the thick scintillator. I didn’t realize yet that I was looking at a Landau curve. And Dr. Roos said. “Hey, go talk to Dr. Jordan Goodman, who is one of our younger professors. He does cosmic rays.” So I talked to Dr. Goodman, and he literally laughed me out of his office. He was brutal. He was in particle astrophysics. He said I was doing things wrong. He told me what I was doing wrong. He said I had put my big thick simulator between the four paddles. There’s two paddles above, two paddles below. I put the simulator in between them. He wanted me to put the simulator at the bottom.
And so having been chased out of his office like a scolded dog, I went back to my experiment. I played with what I was doing. I got the Landau curve. That’s how I learned about the Landau curve. And I actually went and studied up on it. I found out by looking through things. And then I went back. I took Kai Siegbahn’s book “Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy”, a really good book, and I got my new results. I tried it his way and I tried it my way and my way worked better, and I marched right back into his office and said “OK, I did this and I did this and I did this and I get this, this is the Landau curve. It looks like this crazy equation, but here’s where it’s coming from with the physics. I tried it your way and I tried it my way and my way worked better. He didn’t laugh and I ended up working for him. He sent me first to New Mexico to work on the MILAGRO detector. This was a Cherenkov detector. Cherenkov detectors, they’re water, ultra-pure water, and particles go through them at very, very high speed, faster than the speed of light in water, and they are giving off shock waves, just like supersonic shockwaves. Only this is light. It’s called Cherenkov radiation. It’s blue. I forget exactly why the physics makes it blue, but it does, and there’s an opening angle cone, it’s the same physics, just with light instead of sound, and you pick those up with photomultiplier, tubes set in the water. It’s actually quite similar to the work with scintillators, but you’re putting photomultiplier tubes in the water instead of on a scintillator. Same kind of deal. Different physics makes the light, but from the photomultiplier tube out, it’s the same thing. So I had a one heck of an adventure one summer in New Mexico. One of the other two guys in my study group, named Aaron Eichelberger, went out with me. And we both worked on the detector over the summer. That was good times. Up at 10,000 feet, I was in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life.
I’ll bet.
Just about. We were building. We had these sand filled PVC pipes at 100 pounds a pop and I would pick one up and take it into the detector, you know? I was basically doing grunt construction work. I helped tear down the Cygnus detector too, which was another scintillation detector. The following winter Jordan Goodman sent me to the Super-K detector in Japan. He also wrote my recommendation letters for grad school. And my plan, long story short, paid off. I was accepted by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s APS Department, which is Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. That’s a very, very good program and I was going to go there until I was accepted by Caltech. Caltech is where I always wanted to go. I had applied to Caltech for transfer when I was fifteen and they said no, but for grad school they said yes. I figured they might because I was weird and Caltech does weird. Caltech is weird. (laughs)
I applied to Berkeley, too, mostly for my stepfather because he was a Berkeley man, but I figured Berkeley wouldn’t touch me with a 10 foot pole, and they didn’t. They said: “No, thank you!” So I went to Tech and I ended up working in cosmic rays. I worked for Ed Stone, who was the director of JPL, who went from managing 5,000 people at JPL when he retired to managing me! (smiles). That was kind of an intense experience, but he taught me wonderful, wonderful things. I started off as an anomalous cosmic ray physicist. That’s what I wanted to do, looking for the termination shock, but Voyager didn’t get there during my time in graduate school. I remember spending a long six months trying to figure out, can I do this? I did my candidacy exam and advanced to candidacy based on anomalous cosmic rays, but then realized I didn’t have enough for a thesis. That was a low point. I was depressed but one day I came into my office and there on my chair was a stack of papers about solar particles. And I said “OK, I’m a solar particle physicist now!” So I ended up doing a thesis on solar particles. And I found, you know, cosmic rays, solar particles, the guy who did the thesis before me put into his acknowledgements that “it is often a dry field.” That’s a hard thing. Most folks who get cosmic ray, space cosmic ray degrees, end up elsewhere, and I did too. I was in grad school. I graduated. I did my thing and actually my defense was fun. I didn’t want my defense to last forever, so I wanted to schedule it for 11:00 o’clock, right before lunch, because noon rolls around and everybody at Caltech goes to lunch at noon, the whole campus, everyone turns out for lunch. It’s the only time you ever see people on campus, noon. And I figured that my thesis wasn’t nearly as important to my thesis committee as lunch, so I figured they would give me an easy pass. So I proposed this time to my advisor, and he said no. He rescheduled it for, I think, 8:00 o’clock in the morning or something horrible like that, 9:00 o’clock, and I gave my talk, I did my thing. I even had one of the guys there who loves to kill grad students. We were required to have at least one of those people on our committee and I had them both times (candidacy and defense). They just love to murder the ill-prepared grad student. So I gave my talk, it was like forty, fifty minutes, and I solicited questions. And one of them said, “Well, you’ve got a typo on page 2”. And the other one said “It’s kind of thin, it’s only 125 pages. Did you do more than that? And I said, “Well, I did. I worked on anomalous cosmic rays, but I didn’t think that was worthy of going into this thesis because it’s different. And they said “OK”. They had essentially no questions for me. Ed looked at me and said, “I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I’ve never seen that!” So apparently I did pretty well.
You know, you would have ace’d a PhD in behavioral psychology! There are so many ways that you did things, interacting with other human beings, understanding their motivations and what impels them, developing your own strategies for success.
Well, you know, I learned a lot of that in the IRS. There you’re walking into a situation which is absolutely beyond question, adversarial.
Yeah, you changed the job that you had there. The way they set you up to go out with a suit and tie on, and then you found that what works better is to be human and meet people at their level. And your results bore that out.
Yep. they did.
But that was you. It was almost reverse psychology that you worked on people. Instead of coming in with a hammer, you came in with a handshake, saying “What can I do to help you comply?”
Yeah, I had people actually thank me for coming into their lives. Because my assumption, my feeling, is there’s this willful naivete, which I call honor. But one mustn’t misunderstand. It is a naivete about the world and the people in it, and I decide to be that way. I decide that people have good intentions, generally speaking, but not all of them. Clearly there’s some bad apples out there. There’s no question that if you do life this way you’re going to get hurt. It does happen. But you live better. You just live better.
I think that’s a good philosophy. Now let me direct this a bit because we’ve already gone longer than most of these interviews go, but your story is fascinating. I’ve pretty much thrown away the interview questions because you’re telling about yourself and that’s what we wanted you to do. It’s just a wonderful story. It’s been different from the other ones that we’ve done and probably better for that, so I’m not concerned, but there are a couple of things we want to touch on, get your thoughts on, and then when we get this back to you on paper, if there’s more you want to say about this, or if you want to talk about something else, you can conduct your own interview and just write the way you want it. I don’t think it matters how long it is. It’ll probably be one of the longer ones, but I think when we post it, it can go down as far as there are words and people are willing to hang in there and read it. It’s a fascinating read, that’s for sure. But one of the things we like to ask is, OK, you’ve had a very, as you said “circuitous” route to getting your job, but you’re good at it, and it’s what you apparently love, because you went back to it twice, into physics, and now planetary physics. But if you weren’t a NASA research scientist, or a physicist, what would your dream job be?
Well, I mean, the dream job for me, I have to admit, as I told you: scientist, engineer, astronaut.
OK, you did answer that already.
The neat part is, when I got out of grad school, I went to work for Northrop Grumman as a system engineer and I learned about system engineering. So I’ve actually ticked off two of the three.
Yes, you have.
Let me give you a slightly different and slightly better answer than that, which is I have had a cataract in my left eye, starting from when I was very, very young, so I was unable to pursue what I otherwise might have done, which is that I would have gone after being a pilot in the Air Force or the Navy. That’s the other thing I wanted to do. I love to fly.
You’ve told us a lot about your education and about your work, but what do you do for fun?
Well, I have a family, first off.
Tell us about your family. We want to know about that, too.
My wife, Marie, actually has a PhD in developmental psychology from Cornell, which she completed in my living room at Caltech.
Really?
Because I sat her down and fed her for a summer, and allowed her to do nothing but her thesis for the summer. I feel very proud of that. But her real passion is books; she’s a librarian. So I actually put her through library school too. She’s now a librarian over at San Jose City Library and loving it, I hope. At least I think she is. We have two children, a daughter, Lynn, who is 17 and a senior in high school. And she loves cats. We have a cat, it’s a long story. Our son Tristan is 14. He just started high school. He likes building stuff. I need to get him focused on his math, but he likes building things and that’s very cool. I want him to keep doing that. He can be wildly creative. Mostly he likes to work in paper, but now I’m trying to get him to work in other things. So that’s the family. We like to travel. We like to go places, just go visit stuff, you know. I’m trying to sell them on California too, because I did uproot them from South Carolina, which they had known basically their whole lives, and it’s been quite a readjustment. But in terms of other things I like to do, well there’s the standard stuff, you know, music and various things and reading. And in fact, if you’re wondering about what kind of books I like to read the most, it used to be science fiction. I like science fiction, but I‘ve got to be honest: the latest thing I’m into is primary sources. That’s actually always been true and I’m going to sound really horrible here, but I’m the kind of guy who reads the original Marco Polo. I’ve read Voltaire, Giraldus Cambrensis, also called Gerald of Wales, who wrote in the 13th century. I read the English translations. Sometimes I try to read the others, but it’s difficult. My ancient languages aren’t that good. I kind of wish they were. I’d like them to be, but they’re not. I like reading histories as well, and biography and things like that. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. I’ve been trying to learn a lot about the history of the Spanish-American War period and the First World War. It’s very, very interesting. Other things I do: I’m a private pilot and in fact, I am in the middle of a long odyssey to pick up an airplane and bring it home. It’s my own. It’s called a Varga, and it’s a tandem two-seat training aircraft. It’s got a glass canopy and a low wing, and looks like a little fighter airplane from the ‘40s or something. I’m halfway through flying it from Minnesota to here. I had a few problems along the way, and had to stop in Amarillo for repairs. Hopefully I’ll be finishing the trip soon. So in the near future I’m going to have a blast. I like driving, too. I have a Jeep. It’s a funky diesel from Japan. I also like to hike, though I haven’t done a whole lot of hiking lately.
You mentioned music. Do you play an instrument?
No, no, not really. I tried. I failed.
Where does your taste run in music, then?
Oh, to all kinds of things. I grew up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s and you know, I was poisoned by Sting, The Police, Genesis, stuff like that. But I’m a big fan of folk music. American folk music, but also English folk music and Scottish and Irish folk music as well. Even Welsh. That’s really great stuff actually. Breton and other things like that. I’m a big fan of Newfoundland folk music, I discovered that in Newfoundland on my trip for the IRS. So I do a lot of that sort of thing and lately in the last 15 years or so, I’ve actually become a devotee of some forms of country music, so shoot me! No, no, no, it’s all good stuff. I mean, music is music. It’s good stuff. I like classical music too. I’m a big fan of all sorts of things classical. I used to love Baroque music exclusively, but my tastes have become a little more sophisticated since then. I like all sorts of things now.
That’s very eclectic and I appreciate that. I think about when people ask me what my favorite color is and I’ve thought, how can you answer a question like that? The colors are all in context, they’re all beautiful. They’re all wonderful. We would miss any one of them if they weren’t there.
On the kids, by the way, our daughter is a violist and our son’s a cellist, so they like music too.
My kids at Badwater Basin, Death Valley. I gave a talk at the Dark Sky Festival, February 2024
Yes, you mentioned you have an airplane and a Jeep. Are you interested in mechanics at all? I know Jeeps tend to have a good amount of repairs. I don’t know if pilots fix their own planes, how does that end up going?
Luke’s Varga airplane parked at Reid-Hillview airport after he flew it to California from Minnesota. Luke flying solo. And with his daughter. You don’t do a lot of fixing of your plane as a pilot (unless you really want to). The Jeep I have is a diesel from Japan, so it’s incredibly reliable. I’ve never breaks. But I have to admit, when I was in grad school, I desperately wanted to get involved in lab work. I went downstairs one day and I talked to the post doc who was leading a balloon flight project for high energy cosmic rays. And I said, “I want to get into lab work”. And she said, “Great! I’m so glad you want to get into lab work. Here, analyze this data.” And I got pegged as a theorist, my whole career. But that all changed after I left grad school and I started working with JPL. Northrup Grumman sent me to work at JPL two days a week for a good long time, and I learned about lab work. I learned all sorts of fun things. I learned about experiment design and I started doing it. I started building things and I have really found the joy of building an experiment and making it work. I adore it. I love it. I’m doing it on a project called SPARTA, right now. I’ve actually had to build it, build the experiment, a couple of times. The last time was for Zero-G flight, and when I showed up at the airport, the PI was there and he handed me a bag. That’s not hyperbole. He handed me a bag of broken parts that I had never seen and said “Here’s your experiment. And it has to be ready in 40 hours. And we don’t know how to do it.” So I had to figure it out and make it work, in 40 hours. From nothing. And I did. And we flew and we got data and I was very, very proud of that.
Aboard Zero-G light for SPARTA You are absolutely one of the most fascinating people that I have ever had to privilege of talking with and knowing. I’m just incredulous at your story. It’s wonderful. It’ll play very well in our series, but it really belongs in a book or a biography or something like that. A lot of people could learn from it.
Well, I have to tell you, coming here to Ames is in many ways absolutely a culmination. I giggle when I come to work, are you kidding me? And I tell everybody this, I’m a NASA fan boy. And I will put the disclaimer out first that I understand that NASA is a large, dysfunctional government agency that is going to break your heart. OK, it’s going to do it because that’s what big dysfunctional government agencies do. It’s going to enrage. It’s going to make you frustrated. You’re going to want to kill it. But I love it. I am a massive fan.
Yes, you’re absolutely right. But it needs people like you.
Yeah, but when I come in, I like coming into Ames because I just giggle! I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe that I’m a bona fide NASA rocket scientist! After all this time, I get to finally do it. I wanted to be a scientist, you know. And the other thing that comes to me is I can’t believe they took me. I had the exact same reaction in grad school at Caltech. And by the way, so did everybody else. I went and talked to lots of graduate students at Caltech and they all said the same thing: “I can’t believe they took me”. It wasn’t until I got to the NSF that I learned about imposter syndrome.
Right.
It’s like, whoa, that’s my problem: imposter syndrome. Everybody has it.
I’m hesitant to bring this to a close, but we do need to and I need to explain a couple of things to you.
Sure.
One of them is that when we finally get this into a transcript narrative that you’re comfortable with, then we would like to include pictures from your life, from yourself, from your family, not just of your work, but things we’ve talked about. Anything that would go along with the narrative, You can think about that because there will be a few weeks, but we’d like you to provide a few pictures. If you’ve seen some of the other interviews you’ve seen the pictures. Pictures go a long way to illustrate and bring to life what you’ve talked about, helping people understand who you are. And we also like to ask if you have a favorite quote, something we might see on your desk or wall, something that motivates you or that you find particularly meaningful. You’ve already said one earlier in this conversation that comes from you that I really liked.
Which one was that?
It was toward the beginning, you were talking about the people who do great things. It was something like “brains are neither necessary nor sufficient to do great things”.
They’re not. Now you’ve got to work hard. You got to work hard.
Yeah. That resonated with me when I heard it. That’s a good quote.
For me the difference was that I actually sorted myself out and actually started figuring out how to do the work and that made all the difference. You don’t need genius to succeed. And genius is not enough to succeed.
I like that. And if there’s something that has been sort of a lodestar for you, maybe from Feynman or from someone along the line that you just thought, “Oh, I like that, that’s motivating” or something, that helps people understand who you are, what motivates or impels your life toward who you are today. It’s just an opportunity and you can think about it and put it in later. It’s not a problem. It’s just something that helps tell your story.
I don’t know. I used to put a quote, I thought it was from Alcuin, an 8th century philosopher, a neat guy, he taught Charlamagne, and was a student of Venerable Bede. Anyway, from early medieval history and I have found it to be a very significant quote. It may not be eloquent, but it is (he quotes it in Latin: “Claudit iter bellis, qui portam pandit in Astris”): “That road does not lead toward war, whose gate lies open to the stars”.
That’s profound.
It is and what’s particularly profound about it is that this is coming out of the medieval Christian period and you would have thought it would be “heavens”, as in “heaven”. But it’s not. It’s astris, stars, and what that means to me is that exploration is where it’s at. Exploration keeps us away from the darker aspects of our being. We can avoid war by exploring. If war expresses the worst parts of humanity, exploration expresses the best parts of humanity.
OK. And first of all, I think that’s the first quote we’ve gotten in spoken Latin. That was Latin you were speaking?
Yes, it was.
I thought so. OK. But this is something that brings us together in a cooperative venture. The explorations that we’ve done that have included cooperation with other nations have certainly been among the few things in our world that have brought nations together. There are a lot of things that push nations apart and cause them to go to war but this is something that brings them together in a cooperative venture that transcends earth, really.
Absolutely.
That’s a wonderful quote.
It is particularly true of what we do here at NASA.
Yes.
I mean exploration. Ask me sometime about the defense value of ISS. Because the ISS is probably one of the most important national security things we’ve ever done and for reasons that are completely out of left field.
Yes, absolutely. You’re right. And we’ve seen that recently with the whole thing that’s going on over in the Ukraine.
Yeah.
They pulled out of a lot of things, but they didn’t pull out of the space station.
They didn’t. Not yet.
Anyway, this has been an absolutely fascinating interview so let’s put a close to it and then we’ll see what we’ve got when it comes out on paper. And then you can do with it what you want. And no matter what we do, this will have a limited audience on our website, but I hope you’ll give some thought to eventually writing an autobiography. It’s a story well worth hearing. I would buy it and read it, I’ll tell you that.
I was actually told to do that 20 years ago. And I thought, “What?”
Well, you’re still young!
Alright.
Thank you, Luke. This has been a joy, a delight and we’ll get back to you when we have something, and I think this will make a wonderful addition to our interview series.
I’m glad to help, alright.
OK. And yes, anything else? Any other questions or anything?
No, that’s all I got for now.
Thank you.
Take care, gentlemen.
Luke and his children in the shadow of SOFIA, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. Interview conducted by Fred Van Wert on January 25, 2023
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