The big eye in Arizona

TUCSON, Arizona, is hot. It was 108 degrees when I got there late in June. It was better on the mountain, 7,000 feet up, much better. It was also eerie.

The mountain, Kitt Peak, juts up out of the parched land of the Sonoran Desert, 56 miles southwest of Tucson, in the middle of a Papago Indian reservation. As you go up, the sparse vegetation changes, though it doesn't get any less sparse. The bleak forests of saguaro cactus give way to pinion pines and spiky aloes, and then the pampas grass and the twisted Arizona oaks appear, clinging to the windswept rock of the mountain. The rock itself is a kind of granite, tan rather than gray, known locally as "degenerating" granite. When you try to climb on it which you don't do much, because of rattlers, tarantulas, scorpions, and coral snakes the surface crumbles into very coarse sand, and you slide back down.

The water on the mountain is meager and uncertain, consisting of two or three tiny spring-fed lakes. There is some water in them now, because June is "monsoon" season on Kitt Peak, and there are often short, torrential thunderstorms in the evenings. June is also ladybug season; the mountaintop is alive with them, massed in quivering blankets wherever there is a crevice with a little shade in it.

A modern highway crawls all the way to the topmost rock. On it stands a strange domed structure 19 stories high, windowless and blindingly white. On a lower ridge southeast of the dome stands an even stranger structure a white rectangular tower 110 feet tall, from the top of which a rectangular leg plunges down at a 30degree slant, as if the first two strokes of a gigantic "N" had been cast in concrete and planted on the mountain. Where the two shafts join, a vast mirror gleams. Nothing moves, and there is no sound.

Inside the dome, waiting for the darkness of night, sits the nation's second largest reflecting telescope, the 158-inch Mayall Telescope (surpassed only by the 200-inch instrument at Mount Palomar). The tower and its angled shaft, which penetrates 300 feet into the rock of the mountain, constitute the 60-inch McMath Solar Telescope, largest of its kind in the world. Scattered about the lower ridges of the peak are 12 other observatories, all equally white, blank, and silent.

KITT Peak National Observatory was conceived in 1953, when academic astronomers began to feel the pinch of the astronomical cost of modern telescopic equipment and decided to organize a "truly national observatory, to which every astronomer with ability and a first-class research program could come on leave from his or her university." The National Science Foundation (NSF) agreed to fund it, and after several years of testing for ideal weather, stable air, and the least interference by light and air pollution, Kitt Peak, in the center of the Papago Nation's Sells Reservation, was chosen as a place nearly ideal for astronomical research. After some delicate negotiations, it was leased from the Papagos for as long as astronomical research is carried out there.

In March of 1973, after 13 years of design work and building, the Mayall Telescope was put into operation. The solar telescope and the other, smaller telescopes went up rapidly thereafter, until, today, Kitt Peak supports the world's largest concentration of facilities for ground-based optical astronomy in the pursuit of stellar, solar, and planetary research. It is managed, under contract to NSF, by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), a partnership of 12 United States universities with strong graduate programs in astronomy (of which Dartmouth is not one). Several of the smaller telescopes are not, however, operated under the aegis of AURA but belong to various educational institutions (of which Dartmouth is one). The University of Arizona has several telescopes on Kitt Peak, Case Western Reserve University has one, and one of them, the McGraw-Hill Observatory, belongs jointly to Dartmouth, the University of Michigan, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thereby hangs a tale, which Delo Mook, professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth, tells best.

MooKcame to Dartmouth in 1970 as an assistant professor and the College's lone observational (as opposed to theoretical) astronomer. "That means I look at the sky through the telescope," he explains. At that time, the three telescope buildings on Dartmouth's Observatory Hill were not being used for astronomy. Mook recalls that one was filled with old desks, another was being used as a storage place for he can't remember what, and the dome was serving as a museum. He set about putting them back into observational operation. He had three venerable refracting telescopes to work with one with a 4- inch objective (lens), one with a 9.4-inch objective, and a small astrographic camera, used for photographing large areas of sky, plus one student-built 8-inch reflecting telescope. (Later, a generous alumnus of the class of 1929 gave some money for a new telescope, and Mook purchased a 10-inch modern reflector.)

Mook's plans were to continue using the national observatories for his research and "piddle along here with the small telescopes on the hill, using them to train students." Then he discovered the tree problem. Back in 1854, when Shattuck Observatory was built, there was hardly a tree anywhere on the hill, and it offered a clear shot of the whole horizon, which is no longer true. Mook sounded out a few people about cutting down the trees, but no one seemed to think he would be allowed to do that. "So," says Mook ingenuously, "I simply sent in a work order to Buildings and Grounds requesting that they cut down 70 trees up on Observatory Hill."

Shortly thereafter, Mook received a telephone call from President Kemeny's secretary, who explained that the president desired to meet with him to discuss the tree problem. "Next thing I know," recalls Mook, "there I am up on Observatory Hill with President Kemeny and Dean Rieser and some other people I don't know. We show them the telescopes and take them up into the dome, and they have no trouble seeing the problem, but Kemeny said to me I'll never forget this he said that if we cut down those trees, they would hang us."

There were other problems, too. The campus is now too brightly lighted at night for good "seeing," since ground light confuses telescopic readings, and there is also what Dartmouth's astronomy students call "the B&G nebula," the cloud of gas that comes out of the smokestack of Buildings and Grounds and further messes up the night sky. The president suggested to Mook that, rather than cut down any trees, he think up a good, long-term solution for all of the problems, so Mook and his colleagues began to study the possibility of building a new observatory with a large telescope near the campus.

MEANWHILE, things were happening elsewhere that would have a profound effect on Dartmouth's telescopic destiny. NASA announced the launching of SAS III, a milestone event in the history of x-ray astronomy that was to take place in March of 1975. SAS III was to be a satellite observatory for the collection of stellar x-ray data (x-rays do not penetrate the earth's atmosphere and so must be collected by In this one-minute time exposure taken during a summer storm, multiple lightning boltsilluminate the temple of science atop KittPeak. The mountain supports a miniaturecity, including dormitories, offices, administration. buildings, a cafeteria, a milliongallon water plant, workshops, a helicopter pad, and a visitors' center and museum.

satellite), one that could actually be aimed, just like an ordinary ground-based telescope. Mook and A1 Hiltner, a University of Michigan astronomer who had been Mook's thesis adviser, were very excited about this new development, as were some of their x-ray astronomer colleagues at M.1.T., who were also working up a proposal for a big telescope. At the same I time, Hiltner was brooding over what to do with the University of Michigan's illsituated 52-inch reflector. Michigan's climate is no better for seeing than New Hampshire's, and Hiltner was thinking about moving the telescope out to Kitt Peak for use there. "We were thinking telescope," says Mook, "M.I.T. was thinking telescope, and Michigan was thinking telescope. It didn't take too long before everything kind of fell together and we found ourselves talking about pooling our interests."

Mook presented the possibility of joining a telescope consortium as the permanent solution Kemeny had asked for. The idea was well-received at Dartmouth, and the administrations of the other two institutions were equally amenable funding forthcoming, of course. "And here," says Mook modestly, "I must say I can toot our own horn a bit. Dartmouth did the lion's share of the fund-raising on the proposal to move the University of Michigan's 52-inch telescope out to Kitt Peak and construct an observatory and a support facility for it." Associate Dean Gregory Prince of Dartmouth made the most important touch by going to Harold McGraw (a Princeton man) of McGraw-Hill textbook publishers. McGraw-Hill, out of a concern about conflict of interest, does not normally contribute to academic institutions, but when Prince described the proposed consortium and then validated it by requesting a contribution made payable to the University. ofMichigan, McGraw was impressed. Prince came away with the promise of $160,000. Additional funds came from the Sloane Foundation and the Nierling Trust, and the thing was done. It was agreed that the telescope, capitalized at $500,000, would constitute an overweening contribution on the part of the University of Michigan.

Fifty per cent of the annual use of the telescope would go to Michigan, 20 per cent each to Dartmouth and M.I.T., and 10 per cent would be available for visitors from other institutions at the discretion of the observatory director, a member of Michigan's faculty. The running costs would be figured accordingly. The consortium members were agreed that McGrawHill Observatory was to be dedicated to the optical assessment of the sources of spacecraft-gathered x-ray data.

A ridge on Kitt Peak was leased from AURA, the telescope was dismantled, crated and shipped west, and building construction was begun in November of 1974. There were no hitches, and McGraw-Hill Observatory on Kitt Peak was completed, under budget and under deadline, by March of 1975 at a final cost of something less than $300,000. Mook recalls with pleasure the success of the enterprise: "Nobody thought there was a snowball's chance in hell of our getting the telescope ready to do the optical backup of the SAS III spacecraft observations in March. But that's what we did."

WHY does anybody want to know about the visible light from x-ray-emitting stars or indeed, about the x-rays stars emit in the first place? "Two things," says Mook, "one practical, the other transcendental." He explains that what astronomers see when they analyze the light coming from x-ray-emitting stars is something nobody quite understands about the way nature manufactures and handles matter and energy. Astronomers who dig into such things often reach new levels of fundamental understanding about matter and energy. "Remember," Mook points out, "that the first working example of nuclear-energy release was the recognition that the sun is powered by thermo-nuclear fusion. Also, the first confirmations of

Einstein's general theory of relativity were all astronomical. Over and over again in the history of science, astronomy has shown things about nature that we were not able to see on earth simply because the conditions here are not extreme enough."

It was early in the 20th century, according to Mook, that people began to gather information about the life history of stars. "In one sense," he says, "that's like collecting stamps or studying spiders: So what, big deal, the life history of a star. But something unexpected turned up. These studies showed that our Milky Way galaxy and the rest of the universe came into existence largely as two sorts of atoms hydrogen and helium. And all the other atoms were manufactured in stellar processes. What that means is that all of the carbon and the nitrogen and the oxygen and the phosphorous and the calcium and the iron, all the things that are parts of our bodies, were made in the stars. We are now beginning to understand that human beings are a part of a vast matter recycling plant which operates in the galaxy, which literally makes the material of our bodies." He pauses, muses, and concludes, smiling: "I like to tell students that we are all children of the stars. It's that simple."

Mook speaks also of the transcendental benefit of knowing where he comes from, of having some sense of his place in the cosmos, and he adds, "The neat thing about teaching astronomy is that you never have to explain to the students why the subject ought to be interesting. They're already curious to know what those things up there are. And I'm sure that curiosity is part of you. It's part of everyone I've ever met."

Mook's enthusiasm for probing the heavens doubtless strikes a chord in all of us, as he says. But modern-day astronomy is a far and somewhat disappointing cry from the dramatic science of Galileo's day. Astronomers no longer look at the sky through their telescopes. The privileged place at the eyepiece has been ceded to computerized instruments, complex electronic devices bolted onto the backs of the telescopes. These days, astronomers sit in control rooms adjacent to the domes and peer at television screens and computer terminals, interpreting the blips and graphs of green light relayed indoors by the telescope, which they guide by means of a "paddle switch" on a remote control instrument panel. (The .one remaining link with nature is the need for an astronomer to poke his or her head out of the control room from time to time to glance directly at the sky, checking for cloud formations that may be affecting the signals.)

The instrumentation at the back of the McGraw-Hill telescope is a multichannel spectrometer designed by astronomers and technicians at the University of Michigan, an electronic device that intensifies and analyzes the meager light collected by the telescope. It breaks up the light, by means of a diffraction grating, into 2,048 wavelengths (or colors) across the entire spectrum, registering each photon of light that enters the telescope and noting its wavelength. Measuring the exact amount of light at each wavelength coming from a star is, according to Dartmouth astronomer John Thorstensen, the most powerful single technique in modern astronomy. "If," Professor Thorstensen explains, "there is a great concentration of light at some particular, exact wavelength, that means that we have some atom emitting at the wave length and we can usually identify which atom it is. If we see nearly that wavelength, but displaced a little, it means the star is coming toward us or going away from us."

Time plays a large part in this analysis, says Thorstensen: "There is only so much light that falls into the telescope in a given amount of time, so we have to add up the results of many successive looks to get the desired detailed record of the spectrum.

That's why one needs the biggest telescope available, to collect enough light from these faint stars to wring information out of them. The bigger the telescope,of course, the shorter the time needed to collect a significant amount of light, so that it takes an eight-hour observing stretch at McGraw-Hill, for instance, to garner as much light as a 30-minute observation at the Mount Palomar 200-inch telescope."

It was Dartmouth's turn at the telescope in late June, and I accompanied Thorstensen on the first leg of a two-week run. At Kitt Peak, Thorstensen begins his working day by arising around 3:30 p.m. About 5:30, he drives up to the cafeteria for a hearty, home-style supper (or breakfast, depending on how you look at it). There he may also pick up a bagged "night lunch," for refueling around midnight, or he might plan instead to drive back up between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. for a hot night lunch and the company of some colleagues.

Returning to the observatory about dusk, Thorstensen, checklist in hand, begins attending to the hundred and one details of readying the equipment for the night's run, making certain, for instance, that the Reflectors and Refractors

THE McGraw-Hill 52-inch reflecting telescope with its long black spectrometer in place (left) bears little resemblance to the small refracting telescope Galileo used.

Refracting telescopes pass light through a pair of magnifying lenses supported in a long tube, and, like a camera, refocus it at the other end of the tube, whose length is relative to the diameter of the lenses: the larger the lenses, the longer their focal length and the longer the tube, which becomes unwieldy after a point. Another problem with refractors is that lenses must be supported by their rims alone, which leads to lens sag and prismatic difficulties; yet another is that two lenses means four precision-ground surfaces.

About 1900, Cassegrain invented the modern reflecting telescope, in which light bounces off of glass mirrors instead of going straight through lenses. The light is gathered on the concave surface of a large mirror with a hole in its center. Concentrated by the concavity, it is reflected up onto a smaller mirror above the primary mirror and from that back down through the hole in the primary mirror to the human eye. The focal length required for the magnification is thus collapsed, the light accomplishing the same distance in a shorter overall space; mirrors can be supported all across their backs as well as at their edges; and two surfaces, not four, must be ground. The largest refracting telescope ever built, an instrument owned by the University of Chicago, has lenses 40 inches in diameter. The largest reflector in the world, at Zelenchukskaya in the Soviet Union, has a primary mirror 236 inches in diameter.

million-power light amplifier in the image tubes is switched on and that the nitrogen system for drying the tubes themselves is working properly. If it is one of the rare stormy nights on Kitt Peak, most of which occur in a clump during late June and July, he must a multitude of electrical connections in order to protect the expensive and complex instruments from a lightning strike. Then Thorstensen has to twiddle his thumbs while he waits anxiously for the weather to clear. The first night I was there, we twiddled until after midnight.

An observing run at McGraw-Hill begins when it is thoroughly dark and clear outside. Then it is time to open the dome and make the first directional adjustments to the telescope. From this point on, everything will be done in near total darkness. The dormitory windows have blackout blinds to prevent any escape of light from the interior of the main building, and such light as there is in the control room is red, the kind of lighting used in photographic darkrooms, because astronomers value their night vision. The short walk outside from the control room to the dome is accomplished with the aid of a flashlight.

Thorstensen mounts the movable floor beneath the huge telescope and shines the flashlight on the control panel. He pushes a button to lower the floor so that when the telescope is moving, the six-foot spectrometer hanging off the eyepiece will not accidentally hit the floor and be damaged. Next, he locates the button for the motor which opens the slit in the dome. There is a high-pitched, grating whirr in the silent night, and slowly the dome shutter rises and slides backward. The telescope, no longer cloaked in blackness, is faintly outlined against a star-spangled indigo sky. Another button and other motors set up a low, smooth rumble as Thorstensen turns the dome so that the slit points in the direction he wants. As the roof circles slowly overhead, the building, shivers a little in the still night.

Thorstensen checks the celestial coordinates of the easily-located star he will use to orient the telescope for the computer tracking system, which he must "bootstrap" (re-program) because it has gone amnesiac after the power shutdown required by the evening's electrical storm.-He pushes the button for the first of the three increasingly finely-tuned motors used to orient the massive telescope and its heavy instrumentation. There is a loud clack in the darkness as this first motor, the slew motor, switches on. With a barking sound like that of an angry squirrel, the telescope swings rapidly through 90 degrees. With the slower set motor, and the even slower guide motor, Thorstensen aims the eye of the instrument. Red numerals flash on the control panel as he zeros in on the declination, the right ascension, and the sidereal time coordinates he wants. He gets the star exactly within the field by using the tiny finding telescope mounted along the side of the main instrument. Then, flashlight in hand, he leaves the drama of night sky and long eye and makes his way back to the little control room in the main building. From here on out the night's work will consist of the care and feeding of electronic equipment that, with any luck, will provide Thorstensen with the numbers he can use to prove or disprove a theory he has.

THORSTENSEN is currently interested in star systems where two stars exist close together in space and interact gravitationally with each other. He is particularly interested in such binary systems composed of a normal star and a burned-out stellar cinder. Cinders come in three flavors white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. The first is a star the size of the earth with the mass of the sun; the second tends to have even more mass than the sun jammed into a tiny 20-mile diameter; in the black hole, the mass may be even greater and is always jammed into a still smaller space, creating a gravitational field so intense that even light cannot escape its pull.

"The two stars are like dancers twirling with arms locked," explains Thorstensen. "They tend to fall together and coalesce, a tendency they arrest by orbiting each other. Centrifugal force keeps them apart, but one star is actually pulling material from the other. Material falls from the normal star to the surface of the compact star, the cinder. As it falls down, it gives off energy because of the enormous gravity involved, a vast amount of energy, and because the compact stars are so small and have to push this huge amount of energy through a tiny space, they heat to enormous temperatures and give off x-rays. A light bulb will heat up and give off visible light, but if you turn its temperature up by a factor of 1,000, it will give off x-rays as well, as these binary star systems do." Thorstensen uses ordinary optical telescopes to try to diagnose the conditions that exist in these systems. He wants to know the period of the binary system how long it takes the two stars to orbit each other, which will lead him to an inference about their distance from each other and about their masses. The binary period, he says, is "the holy grail" of his research, the entering wedge, the first step in decoding the binary system.

Unlike solar astronomers, who can actually see structures on the sun with their telescopes, stellar astronomers must work from the clues that they find in a single point of light. The stars they work with are so far away that even a system of two still looks like a single point of light. "All this stuff about, there being two stars there and so on is just inference from various clues we get from studying the light we collect in the telescope," explains Thorstensen.

To do this basic work in a field of astronomy only recently opened up, he begins with satellite data and star charts on which other astronomers have indicated evidence of an x-ray emitting source. These charts of pieces of the sky are based on photographs and look like pieces of notepad

paper, with dots of various sizes scattered over them. Thorstensen's first and most time-consuming task is to locate with certainty one of the charted stars that is a likely candidate for being the x-ray source previously noted, which might be one of the intriguing binary systems he studies. Thorstensen calls these charts "error boxes" and explains that he is trying to refine observationally . a satellite's sweeping generalization that somewhere in this patch of sky containing many thousands of stars, there seems to be a strong x-ray emitter.

The intense concentration involved in comparing the patterns on the chart with those on the furry screen leads to a lot of silent squinting, punctuated with remarks such as, "Gee, that's not very interesting, is it?" and "I think I did it wrong. Oh maybe it's all right." More silent paddleswitch work may produce more uncertainty: "Gee, I hope it's the right star. I guess I'll look around a little nearby. Ah what's that?" or "It's brighter, but it should be even brighter. There should be another big one down here at the bottom. Oh-ho! What's that?" And sometimes, the electronic gods are not with the astronomer: "Oh, good grief. The computer is giving me garbage!" The numbers on a display terminal have indeed gone haywire, flashing irregularly and without pattern. "Oh, boy," mutters Thorstensen. "Where do we go from here? And I did everything right, too, you know?" Suddenly the display terminal goes blank. Thorstensen's face looks equally blank in the red light of the control room. "It's crashed," he says, unbelieving. "The computer has crashed!" Then he slaps his forehead and says, "The air conditioning! I forgot to turn on the computer's air conditioning!" He throws himself disgustedly back into his chair and looks at his watch, which says 3:20 very nearly dawn. "I hereby proclaim we are screwed," he says. "We'll try again tomorrow night."

The next night he is careful to turn on the computer's air-conditioning, but when he tries to orient the telescope from the control room, nothing happens. He punches various buttons, to no avail. He goes out to the dome and checks things there. Everything seems right there. He checks more buttons inside the control room and finally discovers that there are no wires leading from the remote-control paddle switch to anything. A quick call to the resident technician in Tucson reveals that the technician, in checking out the previous night's computer crash, has cable-snatched the paddle-switch wiring harness. It is retrieved from the dome and reinserted. The better part of the night is spent, again, locating the bright object Thorstensen wants to investigate. It turns out to be only mildly interesting once located, but he decides it is worth taking data on, and he instructs the telescope and the spectrometer and the computer to do that for the rest of the evening, while he keeps an eye on the various terminals to be sure the telescope doesn't drift off target and the photon counts continue to be interesting. At dawn, he turns off the various instruments, closes up the dome, and hits the sack.

Thorstensen says that the chance to use this telescope was one of the things that drew him to Dartmouth. "Here we get large amounts of assured time. I can apply for time to work at the national observatories and sometimes get it. But the thing about that kind of work is the pressure to produce results. Here, with assured time, I can take risks I might not otherwise take, be more venturesome. If I were to do this kind of soft x-ray source search at the national observatory and find, as I may find, nothing interesting, the timeassignment committee there would look askance at me the next time I applied. The nice thing about being able to be venturesome, of course, is that potentially the payoffs are greater."

One other valuable aspect of the McGraw-Hill Observatory is the benefit to its astronomers of having a facility in the backyard of Kitt Peak National Observatory, where they can rub elbows with world-famous astronomers. The consortium nature of the connection benefits Dartmouth similarly. "As research schools go, Dartmouth is rather small," Thorstensen explains. "That's a complicated piece of equipment out there in the dome, and it would be pretty hard for us to build something like that at Dartmouth with the couple of electronics technicians we have running around the Physics Department. So we go in with other people at bigger places, like M.I.T. and Michigan, and make ourselves a little bigger that way."

BOTH Thorstensen and Mook are quick to point out how valuable the arrangement is for Dartmouth's undergraduates, too, since the professors often take undergraduates out to Arizona with them. The department once sponsored an off-campus program, in 1976, in which 11 undergraduates were taken out for an entire term. "The faculty used roughly a month of telescope time and devoted it totally to teaching," says Mook. "We had the students do work in a research context, the idea being not so much to worry about whether the research was done with finesse, but rather to instruct them as to how one uses a telescope to do astronomical research."

It is important, say the professors, for undergraduates to learn about scientific research, to learn the difference between reading a science text and doing research. "There is'a hell of a lot of frustration in doing research," says Mook. "The professor in the classroom is the person who assigned you the homework problems, the person with the answers. It's wonderfully instructive for a student to go out to McGraw-Hill and see the professor scratching his or her head and saying, 'I don't know what is going on, either. Let's find out.' "

Lately, the members of the McGrawHill consortium have come to feel that they are pushing the 52-inch telescope to its limits. The future of x-ray astronomy, apparently, rests with objects that are very, very far away and very, very faint (since everything close by has already been done"), and NASA has plans for a space telescope, a 120-inch telescope in earth orbit, a telescope that can be controlled electronically or by an astronaut or by an astronomer working in his or her shirtsleeves in a space pallet. A whole new generation of spacecraft is planned, to be seeing even further into space than before.

"The McGraw-Hill telescope," says Mook, "is a small-to-middling instrument, big enough for research, yes, but there is a significant gap between it and a 90-inch telescope, which gathers more light by a factor of three. That makes the difference between researching objects outside our own galaxy and being limited to it. Beyond our galaxy's stars are quasars and other galaxies undergoing explosive events and showing bizarre properties matter moving at incredible speeds and spectra unlike anything we have seen before. They can double their power output in a matter of days. We don't know why. To study these things, you need a big telescope."

Well, a big telescope is in the works. People at the University of Michigan recently found out about a mirror blank available at a good price and bought it. It is a huge disc of Cervit, a ceramic material extremely good for making telescope mirrors, and after grinding, it will make a 94-inch telescope. The members of the consortium are now busy working up proposals for their administrations suggesting a second joint effort at Kitt Peak: a 94-inch partner across the road from the McGraw-Hill 52-inch.

Mook has high hopes for approval from the Dartmouth administration. "That's the wonderful thing about this institution," he says happily. "The College hasn't signed on the dotted line yet about the new telescope, but they haven't thrown up any impediments to what we are trying to do, either. They're encouraging us. If we can get the funding, they'll be happy; if not, then I don't think it will go. But that's not the point. When you run at this bureaucracy with a crazy idea, they don't just slam the door in your face and say, 'That's crazy!'

Mook even has his next crazy idea partially thought out. "I have a dream," he says. "Sometime last year the dean for the sciences at Dartmouth called me and said he had got a notice from NASA asking for imaginative, creative uses for the space shuttle. He asked if I had any ideas. I said I would think, and I did. Some day I'm just sure it's going to happen Dartmouth is going to have orbital classrooms. Because if there is one thing Dartmouth has proved in the framework of higher education, it is that it has superb skill in off-campus programs. So I'm talking about an off-campus program to end all off-campus programs, an off-campusprogram in earth orbit. Take the students up into one of these space pallets in earth orbit for, I don't know, two weeks or something, and let them study astronomy, earth sciences, earth resources, biology, physics, physiology all the wonderful things you can do in the zero-gravity environment or with no atmosphere! That's the next logical step for Dartmouth College. Sounds crazy and stupid, but it seems to me the next step. And when the time is right, I'll be back at the administration with a proposal for the orbital classroom."

Observational astronomer Delo Mook is often given, he says, to "crazy ideas."

In the red gloom of the McGraw-Hill control room, Professor John Thorstensen keeps an eye on his green blips.

Dartmouth's Arizona connection is an observatory high on a ridge of degenerating granite.