Архив ракетной программы обсерватории Китт-Пик: как США изучали атмосферу Венеры и Юпитера в эпоху Холодной войны

Newswise — At the NSF NOIRLab Headquarters Library in Tucson, Arizona, The Lloyd Vincent Wallace Rocket Program Papers document Kitt Peak’s Space Division, which ran from 1959 until 1973. Complete with historical photos, the Rocket Program Papers tell the story of how U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Kitt Peak National Observatory conducted astronomy and aeronomy research using sounding rockets during the Cold War-period. In 1959, the United States of America was just beginning to build ground-based telescopes on Kitt Peak (l'oligam Du'ag) in Arizona, on newly leased land from the Tohono O’odham Nation. While NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), later to become a Program of NSF NOIRLab, was working to establish democratic access in the U.S. to ground-based astronomy, its ambitious first director, Aden Meinel, also sought to send scientific instruments into space. Aden Meinel was a world-class optical instrument builder who spearheaded the quest to find a scientifically validated site for the country’s new national observatory, leading to the establishment of KPNO. He became immersed in rocketry during World War II, a time when rocket science was emerging as a national priority. He designed fuses, multi-stage solid-propellant rockets, and launchers for Caltech as an undergraduate. As a U.S. Navy ensign, he was sent to Europe to investigate German V-2 rocket hardware and optical instruments. Afterward, Meinel worked at Yerkes Observatory where he proposed construction of a 500-inch telescope mirror — more than twice the size of the world’s largest at the time. That project quietly faded when he left the observatory, but it defined his character: restless, competitive, and innovative. KPNO’s director was determined to lean into the Space Race. In 1959, two years into his work as director of KPNO, Meinel attempted to bring U.S.-funded astronomy to space by proposing a 50-inch space-based satellite telescope. To explore the feasibility of such a project, an oversight committee was formed, and Meinel consulted with experts in the field. Notably, Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, attended committee meetings. Meinel also met with the U.S. Army, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency to present KPNO's interest in space-based astronomy and begin exploring designs for a telescope to be sent to space aboard a large Saturn rocket. The 28-inch Space Mirror, shown here in a tool mount, was a prototype of the 50-inch mirror that NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory’s first director, Aiden Meinel, sought to create for the Space Division. The original photograph is stored in NSF NOIRLab’s historical archives. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA The push to create a space telescope meant that new technologies needed to be created. Kitt Peak engineers experimented with aluminum mirrors coated with nickel, thinking they might be lighter than glass and easier to place in space by rocket. They also kicked off the creation of Kitt Peak’s Remotely Controlled Telescope (now named the Robotically Controlled Telescope) so engineers could learn to operate a future space telescope from Earth. It was steered by commands sent over telephone lines from a computer at NOIRLab’s Tucson Headquarters, programmed with punched paper tape. The ideas that emerged at this time moved the U.S. closer to launching a large space-based telescope, but history had another path to space for Kitt Peak. In 1962, Meinel left KPNO to work for the University of Arizona. The new Space Division director arrived that year: Physicist Joseph Chamberlain, who studied aeronomy, the science of the upper atmospheres of Earth and other planets. Chamberlain would reject the concept for a satellite telescope in favor of a rocket program, which had a major advantage over satellites: speed. A satellite mission required a minimum of four years of lead time, and the instruments had to survive indefinitely in orbit — they couldn’t be recovered for refurbishment. But a rocket experiment could go from concept to launch in about a year, and when a new idea emerged or a new technology became available, rockets could test it quickly. Standing on Earth and looking up, a scientist knows that not all wavelengths of light reach their eyes or instruments on the ground. From an astronomer's perspective, the Earth's atmosphere is a nuisance. It blocks or distorts most of the electromagnetic spectrum, except for a narrow band of visible light and some radio frequencies. Ultraviolet and X-ray — the wavelengths that reveal the hottest, most energetic, and most chemically distinctive processes in the Universe — are mostly absorbed or scattered before they reach the ground, along with the far-infrared. Lifting instruments above the atmosphere would give scientists a clearer view of the gases in Earth’s upper atmosphere, and of the Universe as a whole. In Chamberlain's own words, rockets were “an interface between ground-based and orbital astronomy.” Chamberlain would change the course of KPNO’s Space Division. He would forgo the large, ambitious, and resource-devouring 50-inch space telescope project and replace it with the Kitt Peak Rocket Program — a more reliable program consisting of frequent hops into space with smaller, more diverse instruments. These instruments would be on board sounding rockets launched into the atmosphere to conduct research. The workhorse of the Kitt Peak Rocket Program was the Aerobee sounding rocket. Its first stage was a solid-fuel booster that fired for less than four seconds, but delivered a ferocious thrust, pushing the rocket off its launch boom at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Once the solid booster was spent, it fell away, and a liquid-fueled second stage took over with a controlled burn that would bring the instruments to a precise altitude. About 80 seconds after liftoff, its instruments were exposed to space where they made their observations automatically. By then, the rocket was above the Kármán line — the 100-kilometer altitude where the atmosphere is so thin that aerodynamic flight becomes impossible and only rockets can function. By international convention, the rocket and instruments were in space. Rockets were mounted on rolling booms that were raised vertically inside a launch tower, then pointed. They aimed for the rocket’s parts to land within the bounds of the White Sands Missile Range. The original photograph is stored in NSF NOIRLab’s historical archives. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Kitt Peak’s rockets would be equipped with an array of instruments for studying astronomy: spectrometers to identify gases in planetary upper atmospheres; soft X-ray cameras to take pictures of the Sun; polarimeters to characterize Earth’s interplanetary dust that creates zodiacal light; telescopes that were cooled to the temperature of liquid helium to observe the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The usable science window lasted about five to six and a half minutes. Then, as gravity pulled the rocket back toward Earth along its brief arc, the instrument payload was physically severed from the rocket body. Disconnecting the payload helped prevent delicate hardware from being destroyed during reentry while attached to heavy dead weight. When the payload dropped to a lower altitude, a parachute deployed, lowering the instruments back to the desert floor of the missile range. The team would then drive out and pick them up. The instruments were refurbished, calibrated, and often flown again. A payload tube with astronomical instruments and a parachute lie in the desert after being flown into space by a sounding rocket. Instruments would be separated from the rocket body and parachuted back to the missile range for retrieval. The original photograph is stored in NSF NOIRLab’s historical archives. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Getting above the atmosphere, even briefly, transformed what was possible for aeronomy. The very first set of Kitt Peak flights studied airglow — a faint light produced by chemical reactions between the Sun and particles in Earth's atmosphere. This phenomenon prevents the night sky from being completely dark, but its optical effects are too faint to see during the day. The Kitt Peak flights resulted in the first daytime airglow spectral scans and the first airglow photometry experiment. These advancements increased our understanding of the physical mechanisms happening at a molecular level that create airglow. A series of flights in 1967 and 1968 measured the ultraviolet spectra of Venus and Jupiter. Around this time, a reflecting layer model was thought to be a way to understand planetary atmospheres. This model was fairly simple and assumed that a planet’s atmosphere could be represented as a clear, uniform layer lying above reflective cloud tops. The rockets’ spectrometers confirmed that light was not fully reflected by a planet’s clouds. This meant the model could not accurately describe what was physically occurring on Venus and Jupiter, changing the course of how astronomers investigated atmospheres. In 1968, Chamberlain proposed renaming the Space Division. It would become the Planetary Sciences Division the next year, but the rocket program continued to point instruments at targets other than planets. Notably, earlier in the decade, the first X-ray source from outside of our Solar System was discovered: Scorpius X-1. This exciting new find opened the frontier of X-ray astronomy. Soon after, Kitt Peak launched rockets equipped with spectrometers to investigate the unique properties of Scorpius X-1. They found an optically thick plasma surrounding the object: an accretion disk formed by a neutron star tearing material away from its smaller companion star. In 1970, after 21 launches, the Kitt Peak team had achieved a 71% mission success rate — a record that earned admiration from peer institutions and visiting scientists. But reliability was never perfect. For example, a flight in January 1966 had to shut down its sustainer engine 48 seconds after launch when a pressure monitor line ruptured. Without the engine, the rocket tumbled. The problem turned out to be a poorly tightened nut on a pneumatic line. Then, a December 1966 flight suffered a high-frequency vibration that ejected the rocket's inner liner, causing the rocket to disintegrate 200 feet above the ground. These failures were documented. Every flight had a logbook: reports, test results, telemetry data, correspondence, invoices. The records that survived are an archive of how space science was actually done in the 1960s — at a workbench, with rolls of duct tape ubiquitous in pre-launch photographs and rocket scientists with excellent taste in roll-neck sweaters. Staff at NOIRLab Instrument Shop work on a rocket for Kitt Peak flight 3.39, which launched in July 1971. Instruments on this rocket would identify new infrared sources in the center of the Milky Way in 1971. The original photograph is stored in NSF NOIRLab’s historical archives. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA As the program matured through the late 1960s, its position within the institution became increasingly complicated. NASA had taken formal ownership of American “space exploration” as a concept. The U.S. National Science Foundation would not fund space programs, which were NASA's domain. By 1970, priorities at the observatory were shifting toward completing a massive new 4-meter telescope, which would later be the NSF Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope, and administrative support for the rocket program began to erode. The last rocket flew in 1973. The final manager of the Rocket Program was Dr. Lloyd Vincent Wallace. He had been the principal investigator when the program launched its first rocket, and eventually served as Acting Associate Director of the Space Division. Wallace preserved its physical archive — the photographs, logbooks, test reports, invoices, and correspondence that document nearly a decade of rocket astronomy in granular detail. That collection is now held at NSF NOIRLab Headquarters Library in Tucson, Arizona, where it bears his name: The Lloyd Vincent Wallace Rocket Program Papers. The details of the Kitt Peak Rocket Program have long been forgotten, but its legacy is very real. The pointing technology developed at Kitt Peak to stabilize rockets for astronomical observation went from an accuracy of two degrees to an arc minute over the life of the program — a 120-fold improvement. That engineering was adopted by the Naval Research Laboratory for its own solar X-ray research. A man in a brown jacket bends over a rocket nose cone after its return to Earth. In this image, the crew is recovering the payload of the second-to-last rocket launched by Kitt Peak, in January of 1973. This flight, KP 3.42, carried instruments for X-ray spectroscopy of a quasar (3C 273), a spiral galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center (NGC 4151), and a point source of X-rays in the Virgo constellation (Virgo XR1). The original photograph is stored in NSF NOIRLab’s historical archives. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA The scientists who flew experiments through the program went on to have distinguished careers. Dr. Lyle Broadfoot, who led missions to study the atmospheres of Mars and Jupiter with Kitt Peak rockets, became the principal investigator for the Ultraviolet Spectrometer for NASA’s Voyager Program — the instruments that would go on to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in flybys across the outer Solar System. The program also produced something more abstract: a proof of concept for how individual scientists and small teams could access space. There were dozens of rocket flights and investigators. They reached high and far for data that was returned to Earth on parachutes and carried back to the laboratory, making real contributions to science. Dozens of flight logs of the Kitt Peak Rocket Program, known today as the Lloyd Vincent Wallace Rocket Program Papers, recorded everything from the weight distribution of each uniquely loaded rocket to travel itineraries and meeting notes. Behind the scenes, the planning and testing for each rocket launch was complex. Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Lockridge The Kitt Peak Rocket Program deserves to be known as a decade of space science conducted by an independent and innovative team of rocket-astronomy cowboys, in service of knowledge and their nation. The NOIRLab Library archive provides a bounty of material, ready to be mined for more detailed narratives. The work of preserving the history of this program is underway, with digitization in progress of more than a thousand historical photographs stored in NOIRLab’s headquarters in Tucson. Visit NOIRLab’s online image gallery to view the collection so far. The author offers special thanks to Sharon Hunt and Pete Marenfeld, who made this research possible. Links Author James Edgar Lockridge writes as an independent historian, pursuing a Master’s degree in Journalism at the University of Arizona. He’s a researcher at the Space Imagery Center, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona; a NASA Solar System Ambassador; and an Evening Guide at Kitt Peak National Observatory.