NASA
The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, largely built in a UW lab, paved the way for the field of space astronomy.
In mid-December, if the schedule holds, the James Webb Space Telescope — “the largest, most powerful space telescope ever constructed” — will blast into space from a launch pad in French Guiana. Taking up an orbit a million miles high, the $9.7 billion observatory will begin a months-long shakedown before turning its gold-plated eye to some of the most distant and intriguing objects in the universe.
At the same time in Madison, the UW lab where the field of space astronomy took its first formative steps in the 1960s will downsize by half, a victim of a changing research culture locally, and vanishing funding opportunities nationally as NASA invests more in megaprojects like the Webb telescope.
Layoff notices for half of the lab's few remaining staff were issued earlier this year.
The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2, the world’s first general purpose astronomical observatory in space, was designed and built largely in what was then known as the UW-Madison Space Astronomy Laboratory (SAL) under the direction of the late Arthur D. Code, one of the field’s pioneers. “It played a key role in inventing space astronomy,” notes Rich Townsend, chair of the UW astronomy department.
“It paved the way for the Hubble Space Telescope and everything beyond that.”
In its day, UW-Madison’s Space Astronomy Lab was at the center of the space astronomy galaxy.
Founded in an old warehouse next to Schmidt’s Auto Salvage on Madison’s North Park Street, the lab’s humble beginnings belie its signature accomplishments. The ideas, techniques and instruments that emerged from 35 N. Park St., and later from a lab on campus, helped put the subfield of space astronomy on a firm footing, training a generation of space astronomers and setting the stage for exploring the heavens with telescopes and other astronomical instruments placed in orbit above our planet.
Launched in 1968 into a 480-mile-high orbit, the 4,400-pound OAO-2 was the largest and most sophisticated uncrewed American spacecraft of its day. It carried two scientific payloads, one of which was composed of seven telescopes conceived, designed and built by Code and a plucky band of Wisconsin astronomers tantalized by the prospect of peering through telescopes placed above the obscuring blanket of air and water vapor that makes up our planet’s atmosphere. Observing stars from the ground, Code once observed, was like “bird watching from the bottom of a swimming pool.”
Code, together with UW colleagues Robert Bless, Ted Hauck and others, would follow up OAO-2 by contributing the only original, university-built instrument for the Hubble Space Telescope, a simple device known as the High Speed Photometer, in essence a sophisticated light meter. Simultaneously, the lab was designing and building a novel ultraviolet telescope known as WUPPE (Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photopolarimeter Experiment), which flew twice aboard the space shuttle in the 1990s as part of NASA’s Astro missions.
A hive of activity through the 1990s, the lab employed dozens of scientists and engineers, sustained by a steady stream of federal grants, primarily from NASA, amounting to millions of dollars annually. At times the lab was bigger and employed more people than the UW’s Astronomy Department itself.
Over time, the lab’s star began to fade as faculty retired and as NASA and other federal funders invested in much bigger space astronomy initiatives like the Webb telescope, projects well beyond the capacity of a small university lab.
“The projects have gotten so much bigger,” says Sam Gabelt, an engineer and long-time lab employee who is among the few remaining staff of what is now formally known as the Washburn Astronomical Laboratories.
According to Townsend, the lab was rebranded a decade or so ago to better reflect the work it was doing building instruments for the UW’s ground-based telescopes in Arizona and South Africa. Staff are now putting the finishing touches on a near infrared spectrograph for the Large Southern African Telescope, where UW is a partner. After that instrument is completed in early 2022, the lab's remaining staff "will be working commissioning the instrument at the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)," says Townsend. "Beyond that, we are looking at a number of projects that will support our telescope portfolio and serve the science needs of the department."
“It seems like a lot of the work is going to industry,” says Jeff Percival, another long-time member of the lab who opted for retirement when notified his position would not be renewed. “The telescopes are so huge and complex they’ve exceeded the capacity of university labs.”
Contributing to changes at the lab is a generational shift among the faculty, say Gabelt, Percival and Townsend. There was a time when nearly all astronomers were involved in building the instruments they used to detect and parse starlight. The size and complexity of modern astronomical instruments has, for the most part, put an end to that.
“People are separated from the process of making their own equipment,” says Percival. And because it typically takes years to build a sophisticated instrument, fewer astronomy faculty take that path as it can sidetrack tenure with fewer publications and take longer for scientific payoff.
UW-Madison Department of Astronomy
The space astronomy lab’s humble beginnings on Park Street.
In recent years, in addition to building instruments for ground-based telescopes, the lab successfully developed a star tracker used on telescope-carrying suborbital rockets. The star tracker, says Percival, has flown on 46 rocket missions, typically locking onto its science target within the first few seconds of a 10-minute observing window on a 150-mile-high mission.
The more modest lab means that not only will UW astronomers have to turn elsewhere for instrumentation needs, it signals a loss of expertise and a valuable training ground for future astronomers and engineers. The astronomical devices that astronomers hitch to their telescopes, Townsend acknowledges, “are the most important piece of the puzzle.”
UW science historian Jim Lattis, who directs the astronomy department’s outreach center, Space Place (launched with NASA funding directed to the Space Astronomy Lab), says the shrinking of the UW instrumentation lab is “a natural adaptation to circumstances.”
The Webb Telescope, he says, sucked up a lot of resources, diverting funding from smaller, more diversified programs. “Small things are easy to cut. It’s sad when you look at the accomplishments over the last 50 years.”
Terry Devitt is an independent science writer based in Madison. For many years he covered science at UW-Madison, where he was a press officer.
[Correction: As originally published this article erred in stating that UW-Madison’s Washburn Astronomical Laboratories would close upon completion of its current project to build an infrared spectrograph for the Southern African Large Telescope. The story was corrected to note that the lab, according to astronomy department chair Rich Townsend, will remain open with reduced staffing. When current work is completed the lab and several remaining staff will transition to new smaller projects to further the department’s research and teaching goals, The story was also corrected to note the first location for the space lab was on North Park Street, not South Park Street.]
