In 1957, the Soviets launched a satellite—and many scientific careers
Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the world’s first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. Launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was a 22-in. aluminum sphere with four spring-loaded whip antennae in tow. Although the satellite itself weighed just 183 pounds, it created a crushing burden on the American psyche. During a time of major Cold War tensions, the Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space.
What’s worse, the U.S. satellite that had been under development at the time was a much simpler model that weighed a mere 3.5 lbs. And before the shock of Sputnik 1 had faded, the Soviets launched the 1,120-lb. Sputnik 2 on November 3 of the same year. As I found on NASA’s excellent history of Sputnik, the Democratic governor of Michigan even wrote a poem about it, which questioned then-president Dwight Eisenhower’s ability to lead the United States into the Space Age:
Oh little Sputnik, flying high
With made-in-Moscow beep,
You tell the world it’s a Commie sky
And Uncle Sam’s asleep.
You say on fairway and on rough
The Kremlin knows it all,
We hope our golfer knows enough
To get us on the ball.
What no one realized at the time was the enormous impact that Sputnik would have on a generation of scientists, who became captivated by the endless possibilities that science and technology could offer them. Many would go on to become some of our society’s most accomplished researchers and engineers, including astronauts and Nobel laureates. Sputnik also led directly to the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958.
I did some poking around in OPN’s archives to get a sense of what Sputnik meant to OSA members. Here’s what I found:
• In early October 2005, optical scientist Gregory Olsen became one of the first civilians to fly in space (OPN, December 2005, Scatterings and OPN, June 2004, Scatterings). The chief executive officer of the Princeton, N.J.-based Sensors Unlimited launched into Earth orbit from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. “I remember Sputnik vividly,” Olsen said. “I was in seventh grade. I always had a fascination with space. I’d never dreamed I’d get there...”
• James Gilbert Baker, a renowned astronomer and physicist who passed away in 2005, designed the Baker-Nunn satellite-tracking camera to support the Air Force’s early satellite tracking and space surveillance networks before the launch of Sputnik (OPN, October 2005, In Memory). Because of his foresight, cameras were in place to track the satellite in October 1957. The cameras allowed the precise determination of orbiting spacecraft for more than three decades.
• In his April 2002 history column, John Howard makes the case that the launch of Sputnik and other Cold-War pressures played a role in the formation of OSA’s executive office. The very same month that the satellite launched, OSA appointed a special committee—the Committee on Future Policies (also known as the Baird Committee)—to chart the future course of the Society.
The U.S. Defense Department had boosted support for research and development, and optics was booming at the time. But some young researchers felt that OSA and its flagship journal were not keeping up with the pace of progress. As a result, the Baird Committee recommended that OSA broaden the topics covered at its meetings and in its journal and establish an executive office with full-time staff.
• Rod Alferness, OSA’s president-elect and a senior vice president of optical networking research at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, attributes his interest in science to the time of Sputnik, which he calls “an era when there was real excitement about science.” Former OSA board member James Leger also describes himself as “a product of Sputnik, the space race and the ‘science is cool’ generation.”
• Finally, in the February 2005 column on early laser development, Theodor W. Hänsch (who was later awarded the Nobel prize in physics) describes how he and OSA Honorary Member Art Schawlow used funding from Art’s post-Sputnik-era Army contract for a playful purpose: to invent the world’s first edible laser in 1970. The two used Knox gelatin mixed with sodium fluorescein as a medium for an AVCO nitrogen laser. Inspired by the work, OSA Honorary Member Herwig Kogelnik and Charles Shank at Bell Labs soon realized the first distributed feedback laser with laser dyes in a holographic grating structure of dichromated gelatin.
By Patricia Daukantas
On the National Mall, practically on the doorstep of Washington, D.C.’s decision-makers, 20 teams of undergraduate and graduate students have spent the past week living on solar power.
The third-ever Solar Decathlon pits the collegians from the United States, Canada, Germany and Spain in a competition to design the kinds of completely solar-powered houses that our great-grandchildren may someday live in.
The Solar Decathlon gets its name from the 10 separate categories in which entries are judged: architecture, engineering, market viability, communications (with the public), comfort zone, appliances, hot water, lighting, energy balance and getting around (in small, street-legal electric vehicles powered off the house’s solar-power supply). As in the Olympic track-and-field decathlon, each contest nets the competitor a certain number of points, but there can be only one victor.
The categories reflect the notion that, to be successful, a solar-powered house must actually be comfortable to live in. It can’t be too hot or too cold, it must provide enough hot water for the dishwasher and the showers, and it should look reasonably attractive.
Two years ago, when I wrote about the 2005 Solar Decathlon, the weather had been cloudy for nearly the entire competition, and team members struggled to capture the available photons. This year, drought conditions in the mid-Atlantic region have caused plenty of clear October skies—and a lot more sunshine to work with for most of the week. (Cloudy weather rolled in yesterday, with some light rain today.)
Early in the week, the team from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, was in the top spot. But after winning the communications contest, the University of Maryland—which, with its location in the Washington suburbs, is effectively the home team—took the lead and kept it for several days. Late this afternoon, however, Darmstadt was declared the overall victor.
Maryland’s so-called LEAF House uses 34 Sanyo HIT-205BA3 photovoltaic (PV) panels, which together generate 6,970 W of electricity in full sunshine. Low-mercury fluorescent bulbs and reflectors provided the overall indoor lighting with heavy use of LEDs, attached to a central dimming system, for task lighting.
The Darmstadt students, who had to send their entry across the Atlantic via container ship, placed Schott amorphous silicon PV panels on three sides of their house to supplement the 40 Sunpower SPR-210 roof-mounted panels. The team integrated LEDs into the ceiling, furniture and deck while providing ambient lighting through translucent wall panels.
Similar details on the other 18 houses in the competition—plus information on scoring criteria, blog entries and lots of photos—are available through links from the main Solar Decathlon Web site.
The Solar Decathlon is already accepting proposals for the October 2009 competition. The chosen participants will get a two-year, $100,000 grant toward solar-technology research. Also, American and Spanish officials are beginning plans for a European Solar Decathlon in 2010.
If you are near Washington and want to check out this year’s crop of futuristic homes, better move fast—tomorrow’s the last day of public display.
The solar village at night takes on a different appearance, especiallywhen the houses are lit up for the Lighting contest. In this photo, theCarnegie Mellon house looks lovely in the glow cast on the greenscape.(Credit: Kaye Evans-Lutterodt/Solar Decathlon)
Posted by Christina Folz, OPN Managing Editor
Right next to my desk stands a 5-foot-tall file cabinet that contains every issue ever published of Optics & Photonics News and its precursor Optics News. With 32 years of history at my fingertips, I often can’t resist the temptation to peruse the archives in my spare moments.
A few weeks ago, I came across the results of an optics limerick contest that ran in the magazine back in 1977. I was so delighted by the winning limericks that I thought I’d share them with OPN’s current readers. I intend to organize a similar contest for an upcoming issue. So feel free to send your own compositions to me at opn@osa.org, or post them on this blog. I’ll be collecting them over the next several months to publish in an early 2008 edition. Enjoy! (Note about the first-prize limerick: Peter Franken was the OSA president at the time of the contest, so that is why the poet chose to skewer him in his verse.)
FIRST PRIZE
“With impotence I had been troubled,”
An optician confessed, and then bubbled:
“An’ sure and I’m thankin’
That man Peter Franken
For having my frequency doubled!”
—J.D. Macomber, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
SECOND PRIZE
Though a Michelson Interferometer,
Equipped with a Golay bolometer,
Could measure the heat
In grilled hamburger meat,
It will never replace the thermometer.
—F.F. Hall, Boulder, Colo.
THIRD PRIZE
Optical Frustration
In science, I said almost gaily,
New discoveries are made nearly daily;
But in optics it’s true
There is nothing new,
‘Twas all done before by Lord Rayleigh.
—P. Nisenson, Lexington, Mass.
HONORABLE MENTION
On Interference Sir Isaac was one of those kings
Of optics and other bright things;
But when he took a shower,
He’d scrub for an hour
On his tub to avoid Newton’s Rings.
—D.A. Richards, Rochester, N.Y.
There were four more honorable mention limericks published in the Winter 1977 Optics News—but I’ll save those for another day!
Patricia Daukantas
My September cover story on ground-based telescopes and the accompanying blog post focused quite heavily on the constellation of observatories in Hawaii. However, other cutting-edge telescopes are racking up discoveries too.
European astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have found new galaxies and intriguing features around stars in our own galaxy.
For example, one research team led by Nicholas Bouche of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany discovered 14 previously unknown galaxies that had been obscured by the bright quasars behind them (from Earth’s viewpoint). To uncover the galaxies, the team used one of the four 8.2-m VLT telescopes equipped with SINFONI, a near-infrared spectrograph combined with adaptive optics to yield both sharp images and high-resolution spectra of their target objects.
A group headed by two astronomers from a Belgian university combined the near-infrared light from three of VLT’s telescopes through an interferometer called AMBER to discover a dusty disk around an aging star 2,600 light-years from Earth. The disk, hundreds of astronomical units across, also envelopes the companion star in the binary stellar system.
A third team led by astronomer Olivier Chesneau of France focused on the Ant Nebula, which is some 8,000 light-years away in the tiny southern constellation of Norma. The researchers combined light from two VLT units through a mid-infrared interferometer (MIDI) to find a slender disk of silicate dust in the middle of the nebula.
Another state-of-the-art observatory, the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in southeastern Arizona, is the instrument scientists used to find a galaxy’s odd cigar shape. A team from Germany, Italy and the University of Arizona employed the LBT’s short-wavelength camera and one of its twin 8.4-m mirrors to obtain a mosaic image of one of the 18 dwarf spheroidal galaxies that are satellites of our own Milky Way. The 19 astronomers found that this galaxy is flat, rather than round as most other galaxies of its type are.
According to LBT director Richard Green, the paper that the team is publishing in the October 10 issue of Astrophysical Review Letters is the first article in the astronomical literature that is based on LBT data. Undoubtedly, as the telescope is outfitted with its planned spectrographs and its second giant mirror and infrared camera come online, hundreds more papers will follow.
Finally, this just in: The international consortium planning the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) has chosen the Cerro Las Campanas site in Chile for the telescope. Las Campanas is already the home of the twin 6.5-m Magellan telescopes and two smaller instruments. As I reported in my September article, the first of the seven 8.4-m mirrors that will be combined to form the GMT is already being ground and polished at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, under the grandstands of the University of Arizona’s football stadium.
Photo of the LBT:
Photo of the four VLT observatories:
